Titus Oates, a member of Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, is taken from the time stream and revived in a bewildering 21st century, whereupon he does what any self-respecting explorer would do—heads to the stars! The two Oates stories (“May Be Some Time” in the April 2001 Analog and “Tiptoe on a Fence Post” in the Jul/Aug 2002 Analog) were combined and expanded for the 2009 novel, Revise the World.

Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons . . .

James Van Pelt kindly had coffee with me and signed a baseball for me at a Denver science fiction convention—oh, and he wrote (among other things) this fine story of Weena from the moment that H.G. Wells’s time traveller rescued her from the river. I met the prolific and kind James Van Pelt at a convention in Denver, where we talked about one of his students who later came to Boulder to study computer science. I had misinterpreted a biography of Van Pelt in Analog as if it were an obituary, so I was happy to see the outstanding writer alive and willing to sign a baseball that I presented to him.

Then a vice clamped her upper arm. A surge. A tremendous force, and she was clear of the stream. Air! There was air to breathe, but all she could do was cough. She was being carried. Her cheek rested on skin. Hough arms wrapped her close until they were on the bank. Gently, her rescuer put her down. Rock warmed her back; her hands lay flat in the heat, her head dropped onto the warmth. Against the sky stood a figure stragely shaped. Weena’s vision swirled—she could barely focus—but before she passed out, she saw in wonder, he was a giant.

Philip J. Fry never caught my interest the way the Simpsons did, but after suviving a millennium in cryogenic suspension, Philip and his 31st century cohorts do have some wacky time travel, including “The Late Philip J. Fry” wherein the professor’s one-way time machine takes them further and further into futures with a strange resemblance to various sf movie futures.

Time Keeps on Slippin’ (6 May 2001)

Chronitons skip time forward

Roswell That Ends Well (9 Dec 2001)

back to Area 51 in 1947

The Why of Fry (6 Apr 2003)

back to time he was frozen

The Late Philip J. Fry (7/29/10)

time machine that only goes forward

All the Presidents’ Heads (28 Jul 2011)

American revolution

We are travelers from the past, my good one. Since your time, human evolution has diverged. There are we—advanced in intellect and morality—and the dumblocks—stupid, vicious brutes who live underground.—from “The Late Philip J. Fry”

Professor Thaddeus Fitch gives a practical demonstration of the grandfather paradox to his physics classes.

Imagine that I had the technology with which to visit my grandfather in his youth. Once there, what is to stop me from killing him before he’d had the opportunity to reproduce? But if I did succeed, who was it who had travelled backward . . .

When the evil Aku returns to threaten the empire, a young prince trains for years to eventually fight and defeat him, but before Aku can be fully vanquished, he sends the prince into the future where he battles through threat after threat (with stories told in pictures more than words) in his quest to return to his own time.

I thought once like you, but the sword is only a tool. What power has it compared to that of the hand that wields it?

Tim showed me the one Zim time-travel episode (“Big, Bad Rubber Piggy”) on Christmas Day in 2010. The would-be alien invader Zim plans to send a terminator robot back to kill is nemesis Dib, but the time-travel portal will accept only rubber piggies, which Zim manages to make do with.

Ruby Weaver tells her therapist that her latest beau, Sam Deed, is sweet, kind and quirky—and the fantasy that he’s come back from the year 2470 because of that photo he saw of her (and possibly to make an important change) is nothing more than a game that they play.

The demon of this story carries out an exquisite torture of his victim. At the end, we do discover the victim’s fate, though I wondered what became of the demon. Time travel? I haven’t heard Gaiman talk of this story, but I like to think of it in that way because of the opening and closing quotes.

Siobhan hopes to advance in the time-travelers' hierarchy by successfully transferring plague-doomed children from 1410 Europe to Colonial America.

It had seemed such an easy thing to do. Beguile hungry children with food, ship their dirty young butts off to colonial America and return to the twenty-third century to become the first researcher ever to use time travel for humanitarian purposes.

Time travel was not a staple for the young bloodsucker nemesis, but Buffy did slay time on a few occassions.

Life Serial (23 Oct 2001)

in a time loop fighting a mummy hand

Get It Done (18 Feb 2003)

back to meet original slayer makers

Via, concursus, tempus, spatium, audi me ut imperio. Screw it! Mighty forces, I suck at Latin, okay? But that’s not the issue. I’m the one in charge, and I’m telling you open that portal, now!—Willow in “Get It Done”

[Oct 2001]

The anthology had 12 original time travel stories, including “A Touch Through Time.” Let’s see whether I can manage 12 interesting images to illustrate the stories.

Dr. Connor Robins uses his time machine to grab extinct animals who are about to die anyway (since things break down if he tries to alter the past), and he also a young actress who died in a 1920s fire. Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch, an avid geologist and writer, died of breast cancer shortly after this story was published.

You could steal all the cells you wanted to use in cloning, or some sperm and ova. Anything, provided that the interaction changed nothing about their time-stream. We could even pull some of the bodies forward.

[Apr 2012]

The story also appeared online for theFree Fiction Mondayof 5 Aug 2013.

Detective Wheldon, the top man in NYPD Homicide is approached by two FBI agents who offer to let him go back in time two weeks to observe the 4th killing by a serial killer. This is the first story in Future Imperfect, a 2001 anthology of 12 original time-travel stories, co-edited by the prolific anthology Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011) who was also a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.

When it became clear that time travel was even a remote possibility, the government bought a lot of scientists. Those who didn’t play got discredited.

Samuel Enderby, Director and Chief Researcher of the Enderby Institute for Temporal Studies (and the inventor of the time machine) accidently finds himself stranded in 10,000,000 AD where the only other occupants are criminals who have been launched uptime using his technology.

A marvelous tool for research has been abused and twisted to a vicious purpose.

[Mar 2012]

“In the Company of Heroes” by Diane DuaneFirst publication: Past Imperfect, Nov 2001

A Swiss clockmaker offers billionaire Rob Willingden the chance to go back to his boyhood to stop the theft of his prized collection of Captain Thunder comics. In 1987, Marvel’s own Roy Thomas was one of the founders of Hero Comics which sported a title called Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, but the 1960s timing for the comic book of this story makes it more likely to be modeled after The Mighty Thor who premiered in Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug 1962).

This is a repair I think you must make. It is irresponsible to leave something broken when it can be fixed—

An accident near a black hole has seemingly doomed Kevyn Shalamarn along with her copilot and her AI, until they are pulled into a future that could be taken from Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality.

The goal of this device is nothing less than complete knowledge, knowledge of everything that ever has been, that ever will be, that ever could be.

When a crazy old man calling himself Coyote shows up at an archaeological dig in New Mexico claiming that the Anasazi disappeared into time, Jeff knows that the only way to convince the world of Coyote’s truth is to play a colossal joke on his co-director Jimmy.

Time even passes differently at the top of a high building than at its base.

Sissy is an experienced agent for CollectorCorps, but she always gets stuck with a male chauvinist rookie for her partner in trips to retrieve highly collectable items from the past. As you can tell from the comic book image, I’d say that the comic book Sissy was after in this trip was based on Giant-Size X-Men 1.

Autographed copies of Minus Men 121? Practically nonexistent in 2059, at least until we got home with some.

In his forties, Danny’s parents are long gone as is the hope he had of marrying the girl he longed for in high school; instead, he runs a used bookstore in his childhood hometown, takes care of his Downs Syndrome sister, and has a surprising chance to change everything in the past.

Live your life as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.—Danny’s mother (possibly quoting Victor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning).

Dr. Rachel Fenstone takes her time machine from her universe to a parallel universe (both of which contain the Marx Brothers) where she meets an analog of herself so that together they can figure out where their histories diverged and visit that moment in their mutual pasts.

In June’s reality her grandfather was an inventor, too, but his parents settled in New York, where the boys grew up in the tenements not far from where the Marx Brothers were born.

After his wife leaves for the day, writer Bennett Differing’s house is engulfed in a thick white fog, out of which comes his father who died 27 years before. The second publication in Visitants (2010) is more in-line with the story than a time-travel anthology.

Maybe the dead did use mist as a means of getting around—so many movies had already figured that one out . . . and maybe they did travel in time.

[Mar 2012]

“What Time Is It?” by Rita LambFirst publication: The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories, Nov 2001

A 15-year-old boy sits with his elderly grandmother who had trouble remembering what time she is in, and at least once, the trouble slips over to the boy, too.

And drowsily I put my hand down to where I felt the warm, heavy head shifting restlessly on my kneww, and I stoked the silky crown, and I looked into the puzzled brown eyes of a young dog.

[Jan 2014]

David Wyatt’s interior art for the story from Timewarp Stories

“Timestorm” by Steve BowkettFirst publication: The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories, Nov 2001

Danny and his partner in soldiering are at ground zero when a storm of refugees from a devastated future begins to arrive.

Nobody really knew much about that devastation—The Catastrophe, as it had been called. It had happened—would happen, from Danny’s perspective—almost a million years in the future, or so the Time Techs believed.

After boarding-school student Roxanne Bonaventure stumbles across a bloody old woman who gives her a bracelet, she begins to find herself in different times and alternate universes with different Beatles’ songs and alternate Beatles. This first novel, Any Time at All: The Lives and Time of Roxanne Bonaventure, was expanded into Here, There & Everywhere and followed by three more books.

Set the Seas on Fire (Dec 2001)

Any Time at All (Sep 2002)

Here, There & Everywhere (Apr 2005)

expands Any Time at All

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance (May 2006)

Set the Seas on Fire (Aug 2007)

Expansion

End of the Century (Feb 2009)

Roxanne smiled awkwardly, and looked over Julien’s shoulder at the open stall. It looked unremarkable now, drab green-painted metal walls and a white porcelain toilet. Hardly the thing you’d expect from some sort of door in time. At least proper English children in books got to travel through wardrobes and garden holes, not through unhygenic high school bathrooms.

After pregnant Kate’s boyfriend dies in a factory fire, she decides to forgo medical school and raise the baby along with her best friend David until four years later when a tramatic incident, some melodramtic music and godawful narration throw her back to before the fire.

That’s impossible. It’s one of a kind, and I made it with Meghan in crafts class last week.

Leopold, a 19th century blueblood, awakens in 21st century New York where he meets and confounds adwoman Kate.

Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension. And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all. We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us, forever guessing the future and fabricating the past.

Young Timmy Turner has two fairly odd fairy parents who can grant wishes, but are always creating problems for Timmy to fix, including at least twice when he had to wish himself back in time: to the old west (“Old, Old West”) and to a pirate ship (“Odd Pirates”).

For me, this cultish movie about a schizophrenic teenager presented a shallow understanding of both schizophrenia and time travel.

I have reached the end of your book and there are so many things that I need to ask you. Sometimes I’m afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I’m afraid that you’ll tell me that this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to.

Jonathon Colfax, Emperor of the Roman Empire, tells the story of his travel back from the 21st century and the intrigues of his rise to power. Robert Reed is my favorite prolific short story author from around the turn of the millennium.

What we should do is gather up a group of people, and train them, and then travel back in time and conquer the Roman Empire.

Maks Hamilton, time-travel agent who lives centuries after the troubled times, must travel back to just before the disasters to kidnap a boy. Albert E. Cowdrey is another of my favorite turn-of-the-millennium short story writers.

I’ve got a sense of justice. It amused me to kidnap the son of the man who kidnapped me.

[May 2002]

DC’s The Time Machineadapted by John Logan and Mike CollinsFirst publication: Mar 2002

This version (definitely not your grandfather’s time machine) has imaginative settings, but for me, the refactored plot was all dramatic music and no substance.

You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never have existed. So how could you use your machine to go back in time and save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you. You have your answer. Now go.

A reliable source (well, TV Guide) told me this would be a thought-provoking time-travel Western. I can affirm that the first of those double-barreled adjectives is inaccurate; it’s harder to tell about the second, even after surviving the incomprehensible story of two brothers in the old west (and Macedonia), a mean-spirited woman in the present, and a black dude who may have had his thumbs broken by crooked present-day police (or possibly he broke them at the Alamo).

Edge: What’s you gonna do with this stupid story anyway? Angela: You’ll see at the end. Michael: Only if you survive that long.

Stilted acting and hokey science, but still an enjoyable, low-budget adaptation with a believable version of D’Amato.

Everything is related to each other on some level, and people have discovered that the deeper you go, the more you find that totally different things are made of the same thing.

[Feb 2012]

“Hot Tip” by Billy Bruce WinklesFirst publication: Analog, May 2002

Obscure physicist John Suttle receives a phone call from the future with information about his eventual fate.

As I said, I’m calling you from the twenty-fifth century. I am also a physicist. In fact, I’m the leader of a research group that’s studying space-time contortion phenomena. Recently, we discovered a way to make phone calls into the past.

[May 2002]

Felicitycreated by J.J. Abrams and Matt ReevesFirst time travel: 1 May 2002

High school senior Felicity Porter follows Ben to college in New York and mopes around him for four years before he cheats on her, so (in the final five episodes of the series) her friend Meghan casts a spell to send her back in time where she can be with Noel who’s always had a crush on her although now he’s not quite so certain, after all there is that Hannah girl.

Five shuttle astronauts in orbit watch the mysterious destruction of the Earth, after which an alien offers to send their consciousnesses back in time five years to solve the mystery and save the earth. For me, it was the melodramatic music, weak scientific concepts and weaker dialog that fated this show to one season, although they did take on some interesting questions about how the crew’s actionsmay alter time.

In the pilot show (called “Lowbrow” and aired on a Cartoon Network Weekend Summerfest), two video-game gearheads (Coop and Jamie) find a time-traveling robot in a junkyard and trick him out with a new engine, some new body work, a 671 jimmy huffer, and an eight-ball gear shift before realizing that they (along with the redhead, Kiva, from the future) must now protect present-day Earth from the evil aliens who enslaved the planet in the future and are now tracking the Megas back through time. After the pilot, the Cartoon Network picked up the show for 26 new episodes.

Listen! We need Megas to avert an alien invasion in the far future. He wasn’t meant to be a toy for a prehistoric yahoo and his pet monkey thing!

Stephen Vogt, an archaeology student, uncovers a 2000-year-old skeleton and the man’s notes purporting to have taken a video of Jesus Christ on a camera that doesn’t yet exist. The result is a 3-hour blood-filled, melodramatic chase that, for me, detracted from the more interesting religious questions that the premise might have addressed. The two-part German tv movie was based on the book Jesus Video by Andreas Eschbach with some significant changes to the ending. It was released in the US with a quality English dubbing in 2006.

Gentlemen, sleep well tonight. And don’t forget that we are scientists and not science fiction writers.

I first encountered Sam Hughes while desperately trying to figure out the ending to the remake of Planet of the Apes; in addition to excellent speculation on that count, he had this short-short story about a time loop (later made into a fun youtube video by Andrew Hookway).

Due to a genetic disorder, Henry DeTamble reacts to stress by jumping to important and unimportant moments of his life, including many visits to his once and future wife. To me, the story owes a lot to one of F.M. Busby's stories (“If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy”)—a debt that Niffenegger might be acknowledging in the quote below.

Could I? Do I have kids, Henry? In 2006 do I have a husband and a house in Winnetka and 2.5 kids?

[Dec 2010]

“Train of Events” by James L. CambiasFirst publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan 2003

Jeremy Calder has been told by time travelers that he will cause the release of a deadly virus. No one is allowed to stop him—for he hasn’t done anything yet—and he seems to accept his fate without believing that he can change future history.

Since the history books all agreed that he was going to kill six hundred people on June 25, 2038, Jeremy Calder was careful to get up early that day.

Ellie Voigt’s job is to sit and watch a door, until one day she gets angry enough at Mr. Tarblecko that she steps through the door into a time war.

One man with a sunstroker can be overwhelmed by savages equipped with nothing more than neutron bombs—if there are enough of them, and they don’t mind dying!

[Mar 2012]

John Allemand’sinterior illustration

“The Day the Track Stood Still” by John C. Bodin and Ron CollinsFirst publication: Analog, May 2003

Did I spot a smidgen of time travel in this delightful story of a race where Babs the car is certainly in love with the driver and vice versa, all in the tense context of knowing that if the race is lost, then the car will be forfeited?

I tried not to think about what was at stake. The pressure was bad enough without telling her this was for all the marbles: if we lost this Indy 500, she was gone. Sayonara muchacha. Hasta la bye-bye, and good night, Babs. That’s the way it is when you race the B’arada. They put up a piece of tech, you put up a piece of tech. Winner takes all, Indy 500 style.

[Sep 2012]

“Get Me to the Job on Time” by Ian Randal StrockFirst publication: Analog, May 2003

A man tells the story of his coworker who had a rather mundane use for his discovery of time travel.

Wally didn’t need to see the pyramids getting built, or sail with Columbus, or even watch JFK’s assassination. What Wally wanted to do, more than anything, was get to work on time.

The main question in my mind as I watched this was how destitute did Patrick MacNee become at the end of his life to be found in this movie telling us about his theory of time travel. I never did figure out what all that had to do with the subsequent story of a professor who owes big money to the mob. The professor’s solution is to send three patsies into the future to bring something back that will end all his monetary troubles. As it turns out, the future has ethereal, never-been-kissed babes from outer space with excellent bowling balls (no, not a euphemism), at least one two-headed mutant, and a monster named Gary. Eventually, they all make it back to the present (except for Two-Head) where they form a rock band that Howard Stern would approve of.

First I should explain in layman’s terms the way time travel works. If you create an instrument that generates five billion electomagnetic transit vibrations per second—faster than the speed of light—one can hypothetically travel through time and space.

This is the second Michael F. Flynn time-travel story that I’ve read set in O Daugherty’s Irish pub. This time, amidst philosophical discussion, Father McGinnity tells of a third letter from Paul to the Corinthians that simply couldn’t be genuine.

Based on the DC comic book, fourteen-year-old superhero Virgil Hawkins, aka Static, has power over electromagnetism, but it’s his friend Nina, aka Time-Zone, who takes him and another hero through time in their first trek through time, trying to save Virgil’s mother.

If they can’t get John Connor, then the machines from 2029 will send a T-X terminator for his lietenants in 2004, but they don’t count on John sending back another Model 101 to work with John and his future wife Kate.

Get in! Do you wanna live?! Come on!—John Connor to Kate Brewster while fleeing the T-X

As you watch the first few episodes of this French nearly-anime cartoon (dubbed in English), there’s a challenge in working out exactly what’s what in the group of young friends at a boarding school where the resident genius (Jeremy Belpois) interacts with a girl (Aelita) who's trapped in a virtual world which is terrorized by the evil Xana. I suspect I may have missed a few episodes at the start (I started with “Teddygozila”), but it seems that at the end of each successful adventure in the virtual world, the supercomputer take the adventurers back in time to a point of their choosing. It’s kind of cool that things aren’ fully explained, so I hope I don’t later run into the origin episode!

Time Enforcement Commission agent (and martial arts expert) Ryan Chang chases through time after rogue agent Brandon Miller who’s off killing ancestors of other agents so there’ll be nobody to stop him from what he sees as a moral obligation to right the wrongs of past timelines (but no obligation to fill the holes in the current plotline). Despite my reservations, my friend Tandy, a martial arts afficionada, enjoyed the movie a lot (only partly because she’s in love with Jason Scott Lee), and it is true that even my favorite time-travel movies have some of the same plot holes as this one, all of which yeilds an extra star in my subjective rating!

From time to time, a dead guy asks morgue worker Tru Davies for help, which causes her day to rewind and gives her a chance to save the dead person with the help of her shy boss Davis and her neer-do-well brother Harry. Hannah gave me the dvd of the first season for Christmas, and it took a few episodes for the show to grow on me. I was hooked about halfway through the season, with the introduction of Jack Harper and the suggestions of an overarching plot.

Philip E. High was a prolific author, although not well known in the states. This story, first published when he was 89, tells the tale of the miraculous Mottram’s organ, which unexpectedly sends Alan Stapleton to the past (or is it the future?) on an obscure fragment of matter called Earth—and he may find himself in several other locations before he finds his way home.

I deduce that this device was locked on the past—who’s past, yours or ours? Time is relative, our future could be in your past or vice versa.

The bizarre beast that rounded the bend in the road made Maker’s mouth drop in surprise. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, a top-heavy, lopsided creature having four legs, a narrow head atop a long neck, and a huge shiny lump on its back.

Scary, dark, disturbing, sick and violent —but captivating— psychological thriller about how things keep going further and further astray when Evan tries to fix things by changing key moments involving the sociopaths and child molesters of his troubled childhood.

Hey man, I’d think twice about what you’re doing. You could wake up a lot more fucked up than you are now.

An autistic paleontologist receives a series of messages from a time traveler who is studying a band of Neanderthals in prehistoric Europe, although his one friend, Ron, thinks that the messages are an amateur sf story.

Sometime around the publication of this story, Tim and I saw a ship called The World docked on the Willamette in Portland. The ship is privately owned by the occupants of its 165 residences, and as a group they vote on their itinerary every year. It’s a nice fantasy to think about leading such a life, so long as the ship doesn’t run into the kind of storms that Liz Williams’s similar ship hits in this story. Each of those storms take the entire ship, including Italian citizen Vittoria Pellini, further and further into the future.

I finally got my head together and told Julio what I thought—that maybe, just maybe, we’ve gone through some kind of slip in time, like the Bermuda Triangle, only in the Pacific. I know other people sometimes say—just to be spiteful—that I’m maybe a little bit of a bimbo, and Julio tends to laugh at me sometimes. Affectionately, of course. But this time I really thought he’d laugh, and he didn’t.

[Jun 2015]

“Draft Dodgers Rag” by Jeff HechtFirst publication: Analog, Mar 2004

Time travelers come back to 1969 Berkeley to help Tom, a Vietnam draft dodger.

They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are.

[Mar 2004]

Smallvillecreated by Alfred Gough and Miles MillarFirst time travel: 3 Mar 2004

What if Star Trek/Wars were an adult cartoon with time travel on demand, including travel back to the start of the universe in the broadcast pilot, “God is Our Pilot”?

God Is Our Pilot (4 Mar 2004)

to beginning of universe

Roswell (14 Sep 2005)

1940s New Mexico

Chode Eraser (6 Sep 2007)

Terminator parody

Chode: Hey, you know what the best part of being able to go back to the beginning of time means? Whip: Yeah. Not having to remember what you did yesterday. Chode: Yeah, that. And we’re gonna know once and for all how the universe was created.

Eleven-year-old Joe Soshack finds a priceless 1909 baseball card (never mind that it belongs to that little old-lady down the street) that takes him back to the 1909 World Championship Series where he becomes a not-very-loyal sidekick to the Pittsburgh Pirate’s Honus Wagner in a face-off against the Detroit Tigers and the vicious Ty Cobb.

You know I’ve had people come from all over the world to see me play baseball, but I’ve never had someone come from the future.

In a world where time travel can retrieve past historical figures, Dr. Satyavati Brahmaptura (now a colleague of poet John Keats) receives permission from the History Department to nab Christopher Marlowe in order to prove that he was really a she.

The genderbot still thinks Kit Marlowe was a girl. I reentered everything.

After failing as part of a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, Harvey Birdman is revived as an attorney whose clients are typically other hard-done-by Hanna-Barbera characters, including at least one episode where the Jetsons travel from the far future (that’d be 2002) to the present (2004), but my favorite is when Harvey has to defend Quick Draw “Eastwood” McGraw’s 2nd Ammendment rights.

Gene Wolfe has such subtle plots and such perfection of word choice that he lulls you into a story without your ever realizing that you are in a story—even his titles are perfection. In this case, the story of an apparant time traveler who finds himself on a journey with Greek gods and mortals, but cannot remember who he is or why he was sent to this far past.

I have been hoping to speak privately with Amphiareaws about Time’s enmity. I know that I will not be born for many years. I know also that I have traveled the wrong way through those many years to join our crew. Was that in violation of Time’s ordinances? If so, it would explain his displeasure; but if not, I must look elsewhere.

[Apr 2014]

“Time Ablaze” by Michael BursteinFirst publication: Analog, Jun 2004

Lucas Schmidt, time-traveler, goes back to 1904 to witness New York City’s most deadly tragedy: a ship full of German Americans on fire.

A small piece of paper fell out of the book and onto the table. Adele picked it up and examined it. It bore one line: “http://www.general-slocum.com.” She had no idea what it meant; “http” was clearly not a word, although she presumed she knew what the “general-slocum” part referred to.

In this SciFi Channel miniseries, J.T. Neumeyer (physics professor, widower, and single dad) receives a briefcase from decades in the future containing a police file with the details of his murder five days hence. Once he accepts it as real, he has some success at changing fate by saving a woman from an accident— and then fate starts pushing back by killing her in a different accident, putting J.T. is on a track to meet his own fate.

Over the years, people of all ages and walks of life have been abducted. Now, 4400 of them have returned to a glen outside of Seattle, all at the same time and without any aging or memory of where—or when—they’ve been. We get to see how they fit back in or don’t, how they react to hostilities, how they use their powers such as young Maia Skouris who sees the future, 17-year-old bio-phenom Shawn Farrell who now has an eye for Nikki (not so young any more), and Richard who no longer has his life threatened for loving a white woman whom he’s managed to impregnate without sex.

When a woman awakes with no memory, she finds herself being taken care of by another woman who says that they have come from the future and cannot get back, so they prostitute themselves in various forms to make money and hesitantly take each other as lovers.

And then there are the days when she tells me that we’ve traveled through time, that we have come from the future and are trapped here. She tells me that she was a temporal scientist, that I was her project. That I am modified and enhanced for survival, for time travel, for perfection. Those are the bad days.

No, not Jack Finney and not Clifford D. Simak either. This one is all Jason J. Tomaric. Fourteen years ago (or maybe sixteen, the director’s not quite sure), teenaged Bobby Jones was convicted of a murder that he remembers nothing about. Fortunately, he escapes, and during the escape he finds himself transported back to his hometown on the day of the murder. By the way, I interpret the story as more than just a dream because of the incident where young Bobby is injured and old Bobby immediately develops a scar (although I suppose that could be part of a dream, too).

Look, Awanda, if you could go back in time and change anything—I mean anything at all—would you?

[Jul 2015]

Das Cusanus-Spielaka The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang JaschkeFirst publication: 2005

In an alternate Europe where isolationism is enforced by towering walls and the world is crumbling around them, a secret project aims to save the present by harvesting the past.

Only on the basis of his theoretical work and predictions did Folkert Jensma and Koos van Laere the following year at the Christian Huygens Institute in the Hague prove the existence of so-called time solitons, which Thilawuntha had predicted. These disturbances traverse the flow of time in both directions, that is, they bring about with their passage momentary damming and acceleration in the temporal dimension. They thereby deform the structure of space-time, but are eo ipso not directly detectable by an observer situated within this strugture—that is, within our universe. Their existence can, however, be indirectly demonstrated, because their passage is accompanied by gravitational waves of various strength.

[Jun 2015]

“The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Bryn SparksFirst publication: Robots and Time, 2005

Lady Ada Lovelace, who has traveled through time via a Wells-type machine in a steampunk world, tells her story to an enamored compatriot who is 50 years older than when they last shared a conversation.

It seemed the original analytical engine, the mechanical computer designed and built by my friend and mentor, the great Charles Babbage in the 1830s, had a lethal configuration that could lock up an entire engine if it were ever presented with the right sequence of calculations. The article went on to describe how all the miniaturized analytical engines at the heart of the empire’s technology were just small versions of the original analytical engine. No one had ever changed the fundamental arrangement of cogs and gears and drive trains and clutches. They had just been made smaller and linked together in greater numbers, so here at the turn of the century, I could be driven in a cab by a man whose very thoughts were determined by the workings of beings of microscopic versions of Babbage’s original design, all operating in parallel.

[Aug 2013]

The Time Hackers by Gary PaulsenFirst publication: 2005

Twelve-year-old Dorso Clayman lives in a future where viewing the past is commonplace, but he and his friend Frank are being unpredictably pulled into the past! Janet found this for me at the library in 2010.

They might see a vision of a dinosaur one time and on the second try get an image of a man who might be Julius Caesar getting ready for a bath, or Anne Boleyn getting her head chopped off.

Sean Astin plans to use his 10-minute time machine to repeatedly withdraw the same money from a bank teller that he’s chatting up, but a violent gang of other bank robbers throws a wrench into his plan.

Did you ever wish you could keep doing the same thing over and over again?

A scientist on the first near-lightspeed ship to Centauri A exchanges letters with his underaged girlfriend back on Earth through a wormhole for which time passes at the same rate on both ends. When the ship returns to Earth with its end of the wormhole, the hole will act as a time machine for messages, but the clichéd paradox police won’t let scientist send girlfriend any information about the future.

An artist named Greg, who never wanted to have children, becomes close to Kamla, an adopted daughter of a friend; the situation works out fine, even when Greg does have an unexpected child with his girlfriend, and even when Kamla turns out to be one of the thousands of children with extremely slow-growing bodies and minds from the future.

I'm from the Future, Says Bobble-Headed Boy.

[Apr 2014]

“The Apotheosis of Martin Padway” by S.M. StirlingFirst publication: The Enchanter Completed: A Tribute for L. Sprague de Camp

Some 50 years after Martin Padway was thrown back to Byzantine times, a group of holy men and scientists travel back to the supposed date when the Great Man ascended to godhood.

“It’s definitely a past with Martinus of Padua in it. There are no other lines within several hundred chronospace-years that show a scientific-industrial revolution this early. Quantum factors make it difficult”—fucking meaningless—“to say if it’s precisely the line that led to us.”

Not only does Isabel the witch want to live just like any normal woman, she also gets talked into playing the role of witch Samantha who wants to live just like any normal woman in a remake of Bewitched—and like the original Samantha, she has some trouble constraining her powers. Yes, she’s also an occasional failure at constraining her power to rewind the hands of time.

In 1849 England, Sophie’s abusive husband abuses her and beatys their one-year-old son, so at the first opportunity, she and her son flees to a friend’s house where they are visited by apparent faeries.

They said they were not faeries, but men, “even as yourselne,” from the far distant future, and they were journeying in time! They were most astonished to hear this was the year of our Lord 1849, for they had believed themselves in 1343 and were in great fear of being burned as witches.

No, we’re not talking about that wife; we’re talking about Scott William Carter’s version—Yolanda Green, an even-keeled, mostly content wife of a university professor time traveler—and the story of what she does when he goes off into the future, failing to return for dinner.

“We’ve done it,” he said. “Three times with a mouse and five times with a monkey. The university has approved my request for a manned test run. We’re going into the future!

The alien narrator loves Alice Oxbridge, although the word love does not capture the feeling any more accurately than space travel captures climbing into a vehicle capable of carrying you off-planet. And our narrator has the power to erase the the moments of tragedy in Alice’s life, he cannot do so without breaking his one unbreakable tenet and becoming the prime example of sentient idiocy.

Alice’s was not the first birth I witnessed, nor even the most unusual. The first time I saw Alice’s birth, I bypassed the event, skimming ahead to the advent of the automobile. Gears fascinated me more. But on reflection, something drew me back to Alice in the garden, newborn on the rain-wet grass. The world seemed to move beneath her.

Axelrod is one of the founders of 365 Tomorrows, which presents a piece of flash fiction every day of the year, and this was their first time-travel story, a story in which ships bring items from the future with unpredictable consequences.

I used to think that, more than any man, I understood the consequences of what those ships were supposed to bring back.

For Natalie, it isn’t easy growing up as the only human creation of a mad scientist (including a time machine, of course) and his gorgeous, shapely wife— especially when you have the name of Natalie Doom and a leaning toward feminism).

Apparently I inherited Mama’s looks and Papa’s brains. Again and again in my life I’ve gotten the best of a bad bargain.

Marty Paramus and his partner specialize in legal nuances arising from the new time-travel technology.

So you figured that if you kept Franklin’s biological mother and father from meeting, he would never have been born, your parents’ marriage would have remained happy, and your life would have remained wonderful.

An incident at the Institute for Advanced Physics brings a herd of Triceratops to present-day Vermont, which is certainly a worry, but according to Everett McCoughlan of the Institute, that will be the least of our worries by the end of the summer.

Everything ends eventually. But after all is said and done, it’s waht we do in the meantime that matters, isn’t it?

In his second time-travel story, 365 Tomorrow founder Jared Axelrod has a rummage sale aficionado stumble across a time machine and philosophically discuss why the owner would let it go for five dollars.

So when I unearthed the device from under a seriously disturbing collection of polyester sweaters, I knew it was something to treasure. I just didn’t know what.

I haven’t followed all of the stories in Rusch’s Diving Universe, so I can’t tell you which of the stories and novels have a significant time-traveling aspect caused by the space-folding anacopa. But in “Becoming One with the Ghosts” (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2010), the starship Ivoire gets folded 5000 years into the future. Later, while trying to shut down an anacapa drive gone bad in “Encounter on Starbase Kappa” (Asimov’s, Oct/Nov 2013), Captain Jonathan “Coop” just might have a chance to return the ship and the crew to their own time.

A. Diving into the Wreck (Dec 2005)

Asimov’s

B. Room of Lost Souls (Apr/May 2008)

Asimov’s

The Spires of Denon (Apr/May 2009)

Asimov’s

Diving into the Wreck (Nov 2009)

includes parts of A and B

Becoming One with the Ghosts (Oct/Nov 2010)

Asimov’s

Becalmed (Apr/May 2011)

Asimov’s

City of Ruins (May 2011)

Stealth (Oct/Nov 2011)

Asimov’s

The Spires of Denon (Apr/May 2009)

Asimov’s

Boneyards (Jan 2012)

Skirmishes (Apr 2013)

Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls (May 2013)

Asimov’s

The Application of Hope (Aug 2013)

Asimov’s

Encounter on Starbase Kappa (Oct/Nov 2013)

Asimov’s

Later, he learned that the anacapa malfunctioned, buringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future.

Jack Cameron, a Christmas grump, is taken back to 1965 by the ghost of Christmas Past who then decides to stay there, putting Jack and the cosmos at risk. It’s then up to Christmas Present to save the day, although in the end it’s dues ex machina rather than Present who fixes things.

Past: Charles Dickens was a former target of ours who chose to write a book about his experiences even though we explicitly told him not to. Jack: But it was a great book— Past: It was crap, like everything he did! Did you ever read A Tale of Two Cities? ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst . . .’ Make up your mind, Mr. Dickens!

Thirteen-year-old Danny Levan is a bullied, half-Jewish boy in 1938 Surrey when he discovers strangely colored bits of plaster that can reform into what can only be described as his own protective time-traveling golem.

A pack of chips was constantly pursuing and reuniting with the giant, but moonlight glinted off of one largish piece that seemed in danger of being left behind, lodged in a groove between cobblestones. “Wait,” Danny called out softly and although the creature was obviously too far off to hear, and lacked ears besides, it immediately paused long enough for the chip to free itself and join the others.

While working on murder case that has drawn in his girlfriend, Manchester Police Detective Sam Tyler is hit by a car and thrown into 1973 where DCI Hunt, WPC Cartwright, and everyone else in the district believes him to be a detective on loan.

I had an accident, and I woke up 33 years in the past. Now that either makes me a time traveler or a lunatic or . . . I’m lying in a hospital bed in 2006 and none of this is real.

Young doctoral student Sierra chases back to ancient Alexandria after her professor who seems to be chasing after a time traveler who is trying to get Socrates to abandon Athenian death row for the future. Although I haven’t seen a second novel, a sequel novella called “Unburning Alexandria” featured Sierra chasing around 410 A.D. Alexandria.

If I, today, had finished constructing a device, in this room, which allowed you to travel even a day into the past, and you used it to travel into the past to kill or otherwise distract me from completing the device, how would you have been able to travel in the first place into the past, with no device then constructed?

Medieval boy Throg becomes immortal after Urshag the Destroyer chops off his arms and Hades gives him the power of regeneration, after which he lives a long time through badly written Monty Python imitations until the touching end. Granted that immortality is not time travel, but Hades does manage a moment of time travel for Throg along the way.

You get one guess what happens when you juxtapose these circumstances:

As a boy, Kip Wolverton’s best friend is crushed in a tragic accident in a bell tower.

Then, because Kip is too shy to ever approach the bell-ringer of his dreams, the girl goes and marries his other best friend, so Kip goes off to America to drown his sorrows and become an expert physicist studying time.

Finally, 25 years later, Kip returns to England to do time experiments in bell towers where he finds girl grown and unhappily married.

“Research money is difficult to come by these days,” said Neville. “There is a lot of good science lanuishing because more meretricious projects get the funds.”

In this loose anime adaptation of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s story, young Makoto Konno is thrown into a train crossing on her bike and unintentionally travels back in time to avoid being hit; that leads her to experiment with her ability—yes, with teenaged concerns, but still with charm.

Like all American teens, Asian-American Jake Long skateboards—oh, and he’s also the wise-cracking American Dragon, guardian of all magical creatures. In one episode (“Hero of the Hourglass”), Jake travels back to when his dad was a teen in order to get his mom to reveal the truth about magic and dragons.

Or, I can change things for the better . . . ooh, there’s a whole side of my family that my dad doesn’t doesn't know about. I have the chance to change that, the chance to reverse the last twenty years and redo everything without the lies, the secrets, the being grounded every other week.

[Sep 2012]

Scrat in No Time for Nuts by Cris Renaud (Renaud and Mike Thurmeier, directors)First release: 14 Sep 2006

Hiro Nakamura reads comic books, wants to be a hero, and believes that his will power is enough to move him through time and space (and, yes, it is). I enjoyed talking about this show with my friend John Kennedy before he died of cancer on 18 Mar 2009.

While investigating the burning death of a young woman who washed up on shore a few minutes before a bomb demolished a New Orleans ferry, ATF Agent Doug Carlin gets pulled into an FBI investigation that can view happenings four days and six hours into the past. Oh, who’s kidding whom? We all know these scientists never stop at mere viewing. I would have given more stars to this action movie if I could have figured out how Doug could live in a world where after the girl washes up dead, she is there to bandage him and answer the phone.

Danny: Whatever you did, you did it already. Whether you send this note or you don’t, it doesn’t matter. You cannot change the past. It’s physically impossible. Agent Carlin: What if there’s more than physics?

Richard Donner, the original director of Superman II, was replaced partway through the production. Almost 30 years later, a dvd the movie was put together with mostly his footage and a time-travel ending that was pretty much identical to the end of Donner’s first Superman movie (and equally lame).

Jeepers, I have seen some faraway looks in my time, but with that look, you might as well be on the North Pole or someplace.

When the kindergardeners leave for the day, three kindergarden pets—a hamster, a duck and a turtle, of course—save various different animals from perils, including one episode when the trio traveled into a classroom poster to save a trapped triceratops.

Typical patriotic American family fare with Dad, Mom, two kids, an alien, a man trapped in a goldfish body, and the occassional romp through time.

Best Christmas Story Never Told (17 Dec 2006)

to the 70s to kill Jane Fonda

May the Best Stan Win (14 Feb 2010)

Cyborg Stan from the future

Fart-Break Hotel (16 Jan 2011)

Steve travels to find a beauty

The Kidney Stays in the Picture (1 Apr 2012)

back to discover Hayley’s dad

Getting Scorsese off drugs means he never did all the cocaine that fueled him to make Taxi Driver, which means he never cast Jodie Foster, which means John Hinkley never obsessed over her, and he never tried to impress her by shooting President Reagan, which means Reagan was never empowered by surviving an assassination attempt—he must have lost to Mondale in ’84. Bingo! Forty-seven days into his presidency, Mondale handed complete control of the U.S. over to the Soviet Union.—from “The Best Christmas Story Never Told”

In addition to two stories listed above (“Dropping a Pebble in a Dry Well” by Kathy Kachelries and “Suspension of Disbelief” by B. York), 365 Tomorrows published several other time travel flash fiction pieces in their second year, mostly using pseudonyms. In all, these are the time-travel stories I spotted:

Note: § indicates a separate list entry for the story.

A Lighthouse Through Time (31 Mar)

by Kathy Kachelriesa renter disappears

Dropping a Pebble in a Dry Well (13 Apr)§

by Kathy KachelriesZero Consequences

Suspension of Disbelief (31 May)§

by B. Yorktime travel affects descendants

Fate of Our Futures (3 Aug)

by Michael “Freeman” Herbaugh3m year-old human skull found

Paranoia (12 Sep 2006)

by Michael “Freeman” Herbaughtime-travel researcher being watched

Time and Again (23 Sep)

by Steven Perezteam hunts time travelers

Say Again? (12 Oct)

by Steve SmithStan argues that he can time travel

One of a Kind (22 Oct)

by Megan Hoffman (as by Pyai)little brother time travels

Once in a Lifetime (25 Nov)

by Matt Brubecktime-traveling rich kids

Einstein’s Last Words (19 Dec)

by J.S. Kachelriestraveler visits Einstein’s death

You see, just before his death at 1:15 AM, he uttered his last words to the attending nurse. Unfortunately, he spoke them in German, and she only understood English.—“Einstein’s Last Words”

Cinderella’s nasty stepmother uses the Fairy Godmother’s wand to turn back time and enlarge the slipper to fit one of the nasty stepsisters. Computer animation has produced some nice stories, particularly as done by Pixar, but even the best computer animation can’t live up to the early Disney artists who produced the original Cinderella, and reasonably competent computer animation such as this Cinderella fare, can’t survive a weak storyline, lame dialogue, and tuneless songs. In any case, here’s a relevant cost comparison in 2015 dollars:

Jim uses a porta-potty as a time machine to get repeated chances at being a successful dad at his son’s t-ball game (“The At-Bat”). Janet and I watched the time-travel episode on a happy summer evening.

Modern-day martial-arts-obsessed teen Jason Tripitikas falls off a building with a golden staff and finds himself in fuedal China fulfilling the legend of the seeker who will return the staff to The Monkey King.

Jason: Is this a dream? Lu Yan: No, where you come from is the dream, through the gate of no gate.

[Dec 2010]

Panic Time by John Carstarphen (Carstarphen, director)First release: 1 May 2007 (limited)

Elisa figures time travel can provide the perfect alibi for murdering her scumbag husband. Sadly, though, if you watch this movie with another person, neither one of you will have an alibi for those lost seventy minutes, since you’ll both be asleep.

Carrie Vaughn lives just down the road from me, and I met her once at a reading. Her voice captured me, and her stories do too, although this tale—of time traveling theives, Madeline and her nemesis Ned, who gain their ability from dancing—did not grab me as much as a non-time-travel story, “The Librarian’s Daughter.”

With a few measures of dancing, a charge of power crept into Madeline's bones, enough energy to take her anywhere: London 1590. New York 1950. There was power in dancing.

Arthur Davidson decided to become an astronaut when his father disappeared on the moon twenty years ago. Now, Arthur and a cosmonaut are exploring the very crater where the father disappeared when they come across an alien-built planetarium that may have the power to reunite Arthur with his father.

A planetarium on the Moon. It’s like a zoo in the jungle, or building a swimming pool under water. What’s the point?

[May 2007]

Against Timeaka All Over Again by Cleve Nettles (Nettles, director)First release: 12 Jun 2007 (direct-to-dvd)

This movie was made in 2001 and made the film festival circuits, but it wasn’t released until it appeared on dvd in 2007 (the dvd cover says that it won an award at the International Family Film Festival, but that’s not listed on the IFFF website); there was a warning sign that I might not take to it (the writer and the producer were one and the same), even though the hero (Z.T.) is a high school shortstop and budding inventor with a pretty, doting girl (Delena) and his own future self come back to warn him about becoming an old drunk.

Ahlgren melds the multiverse, quantum mechanics, the mysticism of the East, horror worthy of Stephen King, a little “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” and the violence of addition into a skillfully woven story of young Douglas Cole: his dog dies, he loses his family and moves to Texas, his friend kills himself, and his girlfriend leaves him (though, admitedly, the dog came back to life), all before reaching a time-travel-infused turning point. Many small things were just that little bit off for me, such as the initial introduction of the uncertainty principle. I wish Ahlgren had taken the bull by the horns and stated that the reason we cannot know both the position and movement of a particle simultaneously is because those two properties simply don’t simultaneously exist.

Unfortunately, while I was becoming more adept at making the business decisions that repeatedly benefited my shareholders, I had also been informed by my mentors and closest friends that the proliferating global acts of terrorism—along with the economic catastrophe which had ended only a few years earlier—had been engineered by a power-hungry madman whose sole objective was to become a diety, thereby ruling the entirety of space and time.

[Apr 2012]

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe HaldemanFirst publication: Aug 2007

A faulty part changes a calibration device into a time machine that takes dropout student Matt Fuller further and further into the future including a theocracy of 2252 (where Martha, a sexually spontaneous vestal virgin, joins the adventure) and an AI-tocracy some 24,000 years later.

So he had to plan. The next time he pushed the button—if the simple linear relationship held true—the thing would be gone for over three days. Next time, over a month; then over a year. Then fifteen years, and way into the future after that.

Tom Carson merely fixes time gates from nine to five, while others worry about whether stock pickers (such as his curvacious running partner, Jennifer Campbell) might be passing information to their past selves while they take a detour over a bridge in the past during construction of a new bridge.

Don’t ask me to explain time travel paradoxes. All I do is fix the time gates when something goes wrong. Paradoxes are argued over at a much higher pay grade than mine.

Temporal Interventionish Tom and his implanted assistant Jeannie are at the start of the American Revolution, a decidedly TI-crowded time, when they run into Tom’s love interest Pam, another TI from Tom’s future who is trying to figure out who fired the first shot.

The steath-suited TI leveled a weapon, then droped as a stun charge hit. Moments later the other TI weo’d fired the stun charge fell, then two more TIs appeared and took out whoever had nailed the second TI. But then the stealth-suited TI reappeared, having recovered somewhen in the future and jumped back to try to finish the job.

After terrorists destroy Abilene and El Paso with nuclear bombs, the patriot act dominates the U.S. and the world is engulfed in World War III. Unfortunately, the U.S. seems to be more engulfed in the next presidential election and finding an alternative to oil, which somehow (don’t ask me how) combine to create a rift in space-time that doesn’t really play much of a role in the self-important plot, but does serve to send two monkeys (or maybe two of the movie’s characters) back in time 69 minutes. You’d think by now that I would have learned not to rent movies where the director and writer are one and the same, but I keep holding out hope.

And what did we do when we discovered a rift in the fourth dimension? We launched monkeys into it.

I did discover one fact while watching this film: Adding time travel and musical aspects to the story of an aging, lonely actress who gets to be 17 again cannot rescue an otherwise miserably written movie.

Kinda like I did live my life, but now I gotta live it all over again.

Campfire Graphic Novels, based in New Delhi, is producing an adventurous series of long graphic adaptations of classic novels with vivid colors and striking artwork. Nagalukonda’s work on “The Time Machine” jumps out at you with an exagerated perspective and an original interpretation of the Eloi and the Morlocks.

We did not know the man standing before us, but he spoke with much excitement and passion. Over time, we came to know him as the Time Traveler.

After the events of the second movie, Sarah and teenaged John are trying to lay low when Cameron, a beautiful young terminator, arrives from 2027 and tries to take them away from their problems with a jump to 2007; other terminators follow and violence ensues.

Come with me if you wanna live.—Cameron Philips to John while fleeing Cromartie

While sorting through the attic, elderly Mike Sakler finds a note from himself detailing how he must go back in time to save his grandfather from a mugging near the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Indeed the notes from that page on were most curious. “Planck energy for opening gap in spacetime fabric = 1019 billion electron volts,” read one, but then that was crossed out with a large X as the writer of the notes took a different tack.

In a world where music companies use time travel to plumb the past for new new pop hits, junior account executive Lester Krieg (no relation to my favorite Seattle Seahawk quarterback) comes up with the idea of getting Beethoven to write a tenth symphony—regardless of the cost.

Everybody and his brother Jake knows that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and stopped there. And even the dimmest of music lovers has wish fulfillment fantasies about what a tenth would have sounded like.

The north of Khurosan, not part of our world, lies the site of a bloody battle between the Warriors and the Scholars, both of whom have come through time to take Islamic boys and turn them into soldiers in their war, but one boy’ uncle gives him to a man who promises to take him to a safe place or possibly a safe time.

I haven’t just been to Mecca. I’ve been there in the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

Professor Rudnicki sits in a bar, bemoaning the particular mode of failure of his latest time travel.

Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.

Alan and Victor are carrying out a careful sequence of time-travel experiments with slips of paper, flatworms, stray cats, a potted palm and chimps, with the only problem being getting the time traveler back from the past.

It was while Alan and Victor were touring the warehouse with the real estate agent tht a slip of paper bearing the words, “It worked,&rdqup; materialized on a desk in the office.

In early 1960, Perry Mason author Earl (not Erle) Stanley Gardner and his wife host John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Edward Teller, Ronald Reagan, Douglas MacArthur and Jackie Kennedy to discuss a shared dream in which a time-traveling alien requires them to pick one person to eliminate from history as a prerequisite to a final revision of mankind’s history.

In book six of the series, Artemis Fowl’s mother contracts a terminal disease for which the only possible cure lies in a species of lemur that Artemis made extinct eight years ago. The series is popular, but for me, the condescending tone of the series is its downfall.

A scientist at a top-secret weapons facility creates a weapon that he then regrets. So he steals it and gets on a plane to Mexico with the head security agent’s family, hoping that having the family along will restrict the agent’s options. But the response is out of the agent’s hands when the president orders the plane shot down. Fortunatly, the scientist activates the weapon just before the missles strike the plane—well, partly fortunate: One copy of the plane and most of the passengers are blown into yesterday, while the scientist and the agent’s family survive in a null space that will first eat all of California and then the rest of the universe. So, why were the dead passengers and one copy of the plane blown into yesterday? I never did figure that out; it had no bearing on the movie, except perhaps the filmmakers were Donnie Darko wannabes, and it provided a cheap wrap-up at the end.

After discovering a 64-million-year-old message written on a cave wall, Dr. Frank Reno, a scientist on the original Philadelphia Experiment, leads a group of modern-day Navy SEALs back to the Cretaceous to rescue those who were lost back in that 1949 experiment leading to machine-guns-vs-dinosaurs, a t-rex in Los Angeles and potential paradoxes for the original travelers.

Sheriff Jack Carter is not the brainiest person in the top-secret government enclave of Eureka (though his daughter Zoe might be), but even so, he gets his share of solutions to the zany science project problems that arise, including bouts with a time-loop wedding (“I Do Over” on 18 Aug 2008), a trip to 1947 (“Founder's Day”), a series-ending anomoly for Jack and Zoe (“Just Another Day” on 16 Jul 2012), and other time anomolies.

Zoe: Dad, did you just see . . .?Carter: Yeah, I’ll deal with that tomorrow. —from the series finale

Australian teenager Tane Williams and his best friend (and genius) Rebecca Richards use university lab equipment to detect messages from the future which include a lottery number and a possible route to change Rebecca’s tragic past.

“Try to think logically,” Rebecca said firmly but not unkindly. “How could you transport a live human being through a pinhole of any kind?”

I watched this show when it first came out, but it never engaged me, and somehow the casting seemed off. Not until seven years later did I watch the original U.K. version: Surprise! I was drawn in, partly because the characters appealed to me more, and partly because of a softer sell—still melodramatic, but not often over the top.

It goes like this, Spaceman. We live on a rock, there ain’t no rhyme, there ain’t no reason. We live on a rock, just one of many. Hurling around in some big cosmic jumbalaya. Now you wanna get questiony, that’s your prerogative. My ma took me to a loud church every Sunday. She squeezed her eyes shut, she pressed her rosary beads to her lips and she prayed for good things for those she loved. But, cancer took two of her sisters. Her husband couldn’t make a move without a belly full of gin, her youngest son turned to a life of crime, and her oldest, me, is a nasty son of a bitch who can’t get out of third gear without a snarl. So, who was she talking to every Sunday and why wasn’t he answering? I will tell you why, because we live on a rock, just one of many. There ain’t no answers! There’s just this! And all you can really hope to do is to find a couple of people who make the seventy or eighty odd years we get to live on this sweet swinging sphere remotely tolerable. I gotta take a leak.

An experiment causes Great Britain to swap with a century-old version of itself, but fortunately, physics student Paul and his girlfriend Vicki were with their bicycles on the nearby Isle of Wight, so they make the crossing back to the main island and pedal to the rescue.

The experiment could result in an alternate Great Britain being swapped with ours—one displaced backward in time from the instant of the experiment.

When smart and beautiful FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is recruited by Homeland Security to investigate strange happenings on the fringe of science, she’s given free rein to choose any colleagues she wishes, which leads her to the slightly mad (but kindly) scientist Walter Bishop and his jaded son Peter. I didn’t get around to watching this until it appeared on Amazon Prime after the series finale. It’s a little too violent for my taste, but the three main characters have become favorites of mine just as much as Myca, Pete and Artie on that other show; and as I watched into the first half of Season 3, it became more and more addictive. By the time it reached the middle of Season 4, it became my favorite long love story ever. The first glimpse of time travel was in Episode 10, when Walter tells of the time travel machine that he built to save Peter as a boy, although that episode didn’t see any actual traveling.

Safe (2 Dec 2008)

Walter tells of machine

Ability (10 Feb 2009)

Jones uses machine to escape jail

August (19 Nov 2009)

we learn the Observers time travel

The Bishop Revival (28 Jan 2010)

possible Nazi time traveler

Peter (1 Apr 2010)

Observers time travel in alt univ

White Tulip (15 Apr 2010)

Dr. Alistair Peck loops thru time

The Firefly (21 Jan 2011)

Doc Brown’ son thru time

The Day We Died (6 May 2011)

Peter to future / machine to past

Subject 9 (14 Oct 2011)

short jumps back for Olivia

Novation (4 Nov 2011)

another short Olivia time loop

And Those . . . Behind (11 Nov 2011)

events from four years in past

An Origin Story (2 Nov 2012)

a shipping corridor through time

The Boy Must Live (11 Jan 2013)

Windmark visits 2609

Liberty (18 Jan 2013)

still in 2609

After all, I was the scientist; and my only son was dying and I couldn’t do anything about it . . . I became consumed with saving you, conquering the disease. In my research, I discovered a doctor, Alfred Gross—Swiss, brillant physician, he’s the only man that had ever successfully cured a case of heppia. But there was a problem: he had died in 1936. And so, I designed a device intended to reach back into time, to cross the time-space continuum, and retrieve Alfred Gross.

[Mar 2013]

All good time machines must have crytals, including Napoleon Dynamite’s machine (shown above) and the machine in this story.

In addition to a few stories listed above (e.g., “Sufficiently Advanced” by Sam Clough), 365 Tomorrows published several other time travel flash fiction pieces in 2008, mostly using pseudonyms. In all, these are the time-travel stories I spotted:

Note: § indicates a separate list entry for the story.

Chronolicide, She Wrote (8 Jan)

by J.S. KachelriesAngela Lansburyfield time-travel murder

The Incomprehensible Being (20 Jul)

by Cal Glover-WesselFree movement thru time only

The Yellow Room (2 Feb)

by Seth Koproskitime-travel philosophy

Vis Insita (17 May)§

by Asher Wismeranother time travel gone awry

Unforeseen Consequences (16 Aug)

by Luke ChmelikAIs and time machines don’t mix

Time and Space (4 Sep)

by Rayne Adamsthief to ancient Egypt

A Study in Logic (29 Sep)

by Patricia StewartHomes and Wattson

The Old Man and the Sea Redux (30 Sep)

by Andy Boltcrowdsourcing the classics

The Collector (7 Dec)

by Tom Manzenecsliding sideways and forward in time

Sufficiently Advanced (14 Dec)§

by Sam Cloughfour future collectors

The Time Traveller (18 Dec)

by Gavin Rainemiscalculation going forward

The old man fought off the dinosaurs, mused on the nature of human existence, fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a zombie, then a robot, and then his sister, had crab cakes and fine wine on the Parisian seashore, traveled back in time to kill Hitler . . .—“The Old Man and the Sea Redux”

At a bar, Andrea meets a loopy man who seems to already know her; he leaves a mysterious message on a napkin, which turns out to be a hint about their next meeting where the man is younger and no longer knows her.

If I had the power to decide never to meet him again, I reasoned, surely I had the power to change the course of the relationship for the better.

Physicist Tim with a dead girlfriend experiences various precognition episodes leading up to his attempt to travel to the past to undead the girlfriend, or at least plant the seeds for the precognition.

I’m certain I didn’t send myself any mail recently, but then again, I have plans to do so in the near future—or near past, I suppose.

I am a sucker for a soppy, romantic time-travel story. In this case, linguist Kate Tannhauser is one of the members of a team that’s assembled to deal with the arrival of a man who can be nothing but Prince Madoc of Gwynedd—a twelfth-century Welsh seafarer who seems to be skipping through time at 75-year intervals—and Kate intends to be with him on the next skip.

Based on the linguistic evidence, I must conclude Madoc is truly a man out of time.

The mind comes up with story ideas in all kinds of roundabout ways. In this case, Benford notes that his 2009 story must have boiled up from a childhood memory of Mack Reynolds’ nearly identical 1952 story, “The Business, As Usual.”

Yes, I learned that later. I must’ve read it as a kid (was 11 then). I must look it up sometime. I knew Mack, too, visited him in Mexico in 1966. Odd how the mind works.—Gregory Benford on his web site, responding to a fan’s question

The Princess and the Bear by Mette Ivie HarrisonFirst publication: May 2009

An enchanted king (now a bear) and a wolf (who was a princess for a while) are sent back in time to stop the spread of unmagic in this second book of Harrison’s Animal Magic Universe. Although I didn’t connect strongly with this book, I did enjoy meeting Mette, a friendly young mother who reads and writes all the time when she isn't spending time with her family. That meeting was at Orson Scott Card’s writing bootcamp in Orem, Utah, in the summer of 2002. I suspect that the title of this book is a nod to one of my favorite Card stories, also called “The Princess and the Bear,” although there is no other connection between the two stories.

Yet your kingdom needs you to return, so I held time open for you to go back and be king once more. If you so choose.

Given the title, I figured I might run into comedy or puns, but that wasn’t the case for this story of Dutch historian and translator Peter Van Gaas who travels back to an alternative timeline with a billionaire to commission a Vermeer portrait of the billionaire’s wife while trying not to run afoul of the thug hired by those who have a financial interest in not seeing more works of art from past masters.

Harry’s going to upset a multibillion dollar applecart. I don’t know what strings he pulled to get an import license for a priceless artifact from another timeline, but it’s not going to be worth what he thinks.

A Chronology Enforcement agent is after archaeologist Lloyd Fry for bringing something other than his body back to a pre-unity time. I wish that it had been clear at the end whether Lloyd remembered anything of the encounter, but even without that, there were pieces I enjoyed.

And I wanted to get a hologram of the eiffel tower before it was wrecked by the earthquake. My mother asked me to.

As much as I love Asimov’s The End of Eternity, I’ve also always wondered about the logistics of Eternity’s access to the different centuries. Stross stated that his story, which begins with a clever hazing ritual for Agent Pierce to join the Stasis organization, was a rewrite of Asimov’s story, and I’d hoped that it would address the questions in the back of my mind. Did it? No, although it did take the ideas to a trillion-year span of history hacking and solar system engineering.

They’ll have no one to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organizaton you must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the organization, you will die. (It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)

By the halfway point of the story, Gordon Redcliff (angry, jaded ex-military sniper and bodyguard) is stranded in a primitive civilization 140,000 years in the past, and he must face the question of whether the widow he’s falling in love with is enough motivation to violate his directive to not interfere with “one hell of a disaster coming in just a matter of a few months.”

Lots of blood and gore in this third of the butterfly horror movies, wherein Sam Reide uses his time travel ability to pose as a psychic for police, all of which is fine until he breaks the rules to try to prevent the murder of his first girlfriend.

There’s two big rules: You never jump back to alter your own past, and you never jump unsupervised.

I thought the book suffered from not exploring the consequences of Henry’s travel on free will and determinism, but the movie had even less depth. I watched this one with Harry on my short visit to Scotland in the summer of 2010.

And after she gives him the blanket she happens to be carrying, he explains to her that he’s a time traveler. Now, for some reason I’ll never understand, she believes him.

A curious story about a curious girl, Augusta Prima, who lives in the most perfect of the eight lands, a land where places and time (and other abstractions, I would say) float in an unmeasurable way. After its original Swedish publication, this story was translated to English and widely reprinted, including Weird Tales, Lightspeed and The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Artistic stories tend to be hit-or-miss with me (mostly miss). This one hit, but I never seem to be able to say why.

At his granny’s house during World War II, 13-year-old Tolly sees ghosts from the 19th century and then finds that he can travel there, interact with those who believe, and solve a family mystery. This one had several British actors that Janet likes including Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins and Alex Etel.

Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, does audio dramatizations of Lovecraft’ stories including a nice 77-minute production of “The Shadow Out of Time.”

Tales of intrigue, adventure, and the mysterious occult that will stir your imagination and make your very blood run cold. This is Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, with your host Chester Langfield. Today’s episode: H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time!

[Jun 2015]

“Joan” by John G. HemryFirst publication: Analog, Nov 2009

It’s comforting to know that when you open a science fiction story named “Joan,” your expectations will be met—as in this story of our heroine Kate, time travel, and Joan of Arc.

I realize I may seem a little obsessive, but is it so wrong to wish I could have saved her from being burned? She was such a remarkable person and it was such a horrible fate.

Early in the novelization of the story, Shel has a conversation with his dad about the chronological integrity principle. There is only one timestream, and if we try to do anything to change what is already known about the stream, then time will stop us. On the other hand, if we can arrange for an event to happen that meets the known facts without being quite what we thought it was . . .

What did you try to do? Post somebody at the Texas School Book Depository?

Five teens, trapped in a freak storm, acquire superpowers, including Curtis who can rewind time. More graphic and less intense than Heroes (Season One)—and nobody can fly. Later, in Season 2, another of the misfits travels back from the future.

High school student Terri Bradbury and her high school class take a field trip to the distant past where Mr. Schoenfield sets off a nuclear explosion to experimentally study three theories of time travel’s effect on the future.

We’ll discuss the ethics of time travel in the spring semester.

[Dec 2009]

How I Met Your Mothercreated by Carter Bays and Craig ThomasFirst time travel: 7 Dec 2009

While Ted once again pursues some girl, Marshall does the more important task of writing a letter to his future self, and future Marshall comes back to anonymously deliver a plate of hot buffalo wings (in “The Window,” Episode 10 of Season 5). And in an episode that Janet called me in to watch just before Hannah’s wedding (“The Time Travelers,” Episode 20 of Season 8), Ted goes down to the bar where he meets Barney, Twenty-Years-from-Now Barney, Twenty-Years-from-Now Ted, Twenty-Hours-from-Now Ted, and Twenty-Minutes-from-Now Barney—not to mention two versions of Twenty-Months-from-Now Coat-Check Girl.

Okay, guys, I’ve been waiting twenty years for this. Just like we practiced, one, two, ah one-two-three-four: ♫ Whooooa, ooooooh, ooooooh, oooh, for the longest time . . . ♫

She didn’t like to think about the crushing gravity that would be pulling her into the distant future, but gravity-travel turned out to be simpler than flying at relativistic speeds, so she had no other option.—“The Future’s Promise”

[May 2015]

How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe by Charles YuFirst publication: 2010

Holy Heinlein! Jim Curry kindly gave me this book as a retirement gift. It is more of a lit’ry work than a science fiction novel, and as such, I wish it had more deeply explored the question of free will.

I’m saying: you are stuck in a time loop. If you take that call, then you always took that call. You always take that call. It’s got to be self-consistent with the rest of this. If you pick up that phone, it’s just one more thing that we’ll have to do again. And who knows what complications it leads to.

Duncan Shields is one of the more prolific writers at 365 Tomorrows—quite possibly producing 365 time travelers on his own—and for me, this is one of his better stories.Normally, I don’t like suicides in stories because I feel that the topic is often approached in a shallow manner, but in this case, Shields’s hero has a hobby of tracking and trying to understand teen suicides while he philosophizes about the alternate universes created by time travel.

I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.

This device allows us to transport into the future or past, at a date or destination of our choosing. Unfortunately, the consequences of altering the order of history are so dangerous [thunder], we’ve chosen to leave it alone. So you mustn’t touch!

Riisa Naka (Japanese voice of Makoto in the 2006 Anime adaptation) plays the daughter, Akari, of a grown-up Kazuko (from the original novel). Akari tries to leap back to the time of her mother’s first love, Kazuo, in hopes that he can bring her mom out of a coma induced by a car accident.

I didn’t understand the logic of this short story, which is part of Nature’s Futures series of short, short sf stories. The grandfather, Hubert, is traveling forward in time, begging his grandson to kill him so that he won’t invent a time machine that he’s already invented—but I can’t see how killing him after the fact will do any good. Please explain it to me! In any case, thank you to the kind librarian at the Norlin Library who made an electronic copy for me when we couldn’ track down a hard copy of the journal.

With its logical basis wrecked, the Universe would resolve the paradox by excising the time machine, and snap back to a consistent history in which Hubert married Rosie, with all of its consequences.

The time-travel episode of this Science Channel series is worth watching just to see interviews with the likes of Frank Tippler, Kip Thorne and Analog’s own alternative scientist, John G. Cramer.

That’s the way that entanglement works; and so, if I put a spool of fiber optics in here that’s, say, 10 kilometers long, then she would send the signal 50 microseconds after Bob received it.—John Kramer

Images from the past: not time travel. Precognition of the future: not time travel. But images from the future: yes, time travel. (I know the rules can be difficult to grasp, but it will come to you.) In this case, the whole family, plus the Willards from next door, gather ’round to see the first broadcast of their own future.

A council of Native American elders has been funding Agnes Wilder’s project to view the past, but now they’re ready to cancel the shoestring budget because they haven’t yet seen a demonstration of the technology.

Counter-terrorist agent Eugene Gutierrez, who suffers from flashbacks of his wife’s death, is contacted by a young time-travel agent from his own future with a plea to stop Gutierrez’s own daughter from setting off a chain of terrorist events.

It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement.

Without completely forbidding it, the government allows limited time travel: Each person may send a single letter from himself or herself at age 50 back to age 18 with information about a single event, though not everyone sends the letter and not everyone approves of the procedure. Our narrator did not receive the letter when she was young, and now she approaches 50 as a counselor for others who do not receive a letter.

You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time travel—and oh! Look! He’s done that.

Eighty-two-year-old Rich Swanson, “Swanee,” knows that he’s a burden living with his daughter, so he decides to rent a room on his own, but instead finds himself 68 years in his past, but still at age 82 and uncertain about why or what he can do in the years of his childhood.

Of course! How had I missed it? If there was any reasonable point to all this . . .

This series of stories (available in a 2013 e-book collection) follows pulp hero Simon Rip through time as he first takes care of problems caused by H.G. Wells’s traveller and then searches for Dr. Berlin, a later inventor of time travel.

The Dame, the Doctor and the Device (2010)

by Chris F. Holm

Battles, Broadswords, and Bad Girls (2011)

by Charles A. Gramlich

Chaos in the Stream (2011)

by Garnett Elliot

Darkling in the Eternal Space (2011)

by Chad Eagleton

Loose Ends

by Garnett Elliot

The Final Painting of Hawley Exton

by Chad Eagleton

But to my way of thinking, all of the events of existence have already happened, and are therefore immutable. Thus, there are no so-called ‘time paradoxes.’

The secret service does more than just protect the president: Agents Myka Bering and Peter Lattimer (under the guideance of Artie, not to mention the help of girl genius sidekick Claudia and slighty psychic landlord Leena) also gather and protect remarkable scientific artifacts from throughout history. H.G. Wells shows up at the start of Season 2, but time travel didn’t appear until Episode 10 of that season, when Myka and Pete head to 1961. Later, in the first episode of Season 4, after the deaths of all and sundry (not to mention the demolition of the warehouse), Artie goes back in time again (at great expense to himself). I was expecting more time travel in Season 5 and was not disappointed when our favorite agents follow the evil Paracelsus back to 1541 (“Endless Terror”) to prevent the creation of a warehouse of horrible human experimentation; plus there’s a smidgen of 1942 time travel in the mushy (in a good way) series finale.

After being stripped of his license to box for refusing to be inducted into the Army based on his religious beliefs, the Greatest finds himself in a dreamlike locker room being prepared for a fight while the crowd outside cheers his name.

He remembers going to bed, tired after a long day of training, and he remembers noises in the night, the rush of cool air over his bared body, but he doesn’t recall how he got here; wherever here may be.

[Jul 2015]

The story also appeared in Jonathan Strahan’s best-of-the-year anthology.

I didn’t understand this poetic story of a failing engineering student, Hala, who imagines that a phone call of white noise is many different things, one of which is a call from the future—but I am delighted by the mastery of language by my former teacher at the University of Kansas Center for the Study of Science fiction. She and I also had a perfect day climbing in the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

When Lacey Tidwell’s dad has an attack that leaves him unable to communicate, she completely takes over the family exterminator business including the occassional time-travel trip to delete the origins of various bug problems. I enjoyed the story, but was annoyed that Shoulders brings up the paradoxes without offering any solution.

Termite Trouble? You Can Turn Back Time!

[Dec 2014]

Brons, a librarian, has also had stories published in Two-Fisted Librarians.

Two park groundskeepers, Mordecai (a blue jay) and Rigby (a raccoon), live out a surreal sit-com life twelve minutes at a time, including some encounters with time travel such as the do-over that Mordecai wishes for after a bad first kiss with a red bird named Margaret.

Americus, a despondent time traveler, comes to the 1st century Roman Empire (726 AUC) to introduce clocks, steam engines and other marvels. The original publication of this story is followed by a Shane Tourtellotte article, “Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler,” about the economics of trading through time.

He argued to the scribes that they were naturals for typesetting jobs: literate, intelligent, good at fine work and at avoiding mistakes. “Most of us thought we knew. There were many congenial mealtime arguments about which overarching theory of time travel was the true one. I had my ideas, but they dismissed them. I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t understand.” He ounded a fist into his thigh, a startling burst of violence. “But their theories were such violations of common sense!”

Jeremy was all alone, no friends or family. Nothing but a few hundred in a bank account. Pick it up a few thousand years from now, bloated to millions of future-dollars, and he could live like a king in that super-tech wonderland.—“The Great Leap Ahead”

In the same world as the Beethoven and Vermeer affairs, rogue policeman Francis Patrick Delehanty uses his own resources to travel back to the scene of the first homicide that he dealt with as a rookie cop.

Have you thought this through, Lieutenant? You see a murder in progress. You’re a cop. Do you try to stop it? But you’re not a cop in that timeline, are you? Your lieutenant’s badge is no good there. Are you acting extra-legally? The only badge around belongs to a rookie cop name Delehanty who doesn’t have a clue about what’s going down. And what if you don’t try to stop it? Are you culpable? In that timeline or this one?

Dudley Puppy, a dog and a spy, together with his cat friend keep Petropolis safe from various baddies such as Snaptrap who, in one episode (“Watch Dog”), becomes ruler of Petropolis—now Snaptrapolis—when Dudley and his time watch inadvertently change the past in an attempt to snag the last chocolate donut away from Kitty.

Or, I could set this watch back one minute and risk horribly altering reality to beat Kitty to that donut.

[Mar 2014]

“The House That Made the SixteenLoops of Time” by Tamsyn MuirFirst publication: Fantasy Magazine, Feb 2011

Dr. Rosamund Tilly lives in a house that fights her every step of her life, including a day when it keeps resetting time to 8:14.

She would have been excited if she hadn’t been so horrified: The house was probably destroying the space-time continuum right now and forming a thousand glittering paradoxes all because she hadn’t really cleaned the kitchen. Once she’d forgotten to weed the window boxes and the house had dissolved her feet right up to the ankle.

[Apr 2014]

Where No Sheldon Has Gone Before by Sheldon CooperFirst rehearsed in: “The Thespian Catalyst” on The Big Bang Theory, 3 Feb 2011

Despite buying George Pal’s original time machine on ebay, Sheldon, Leonard, Penny and their gang have never traveled in time, but in “The Thespian Catalyst,” it was revealed that Sheldon had written a one-act play (Where No Sheldon Has Gone Before) in which Spock comes to take him to the 23rd century.

Oh, Shelly, a man’s here to take you away to the future. Be sure to pack clean underwear.

Our hero, Rick “Richie” Preston, is ten years out of high school and doing nothing but flipping burgers when a fight with his father (and bargain landlord) tosses him back into his senior year of high school where he gets a chance to redo everything so long as he agrees to not alter other people’s lives. Even though I didn’t see this released until 2011, it is set in 1998 and 1988, and I think the writing predated the identically named and similarly plotted 2002 TV show. In any case, I’m glad that Denver resident Jeff Kirvin released this story on Kindle.

As I stood gaping at the rows of ten-year-old magazines, a fortyish, balding man sidled up next to me. ”Pretty cool, huh, Preston?”

I can’t believe that I watched this long enough (24:30) to verify that Flashback, a future movie studio that robotically remasters the classics, uses time travel to retrieve props from the past.

Now pretend that this urinal cake is me, alright?

[Apr 2014]

“Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. HemryFirst publication: Analog, Mar 2011

Ninety-year-old Jim Jones is sent back into his 15-year-old body in 1964 to help Betty Knox (who is already back in her 15-year-old body and doesn’t expect him) because all the time-travel agents (sent back to that time to avert the world’s toxin disasters) have disappeared with no discernable effect on history.

And I know that after Johnson, Richard Nixon is elected president. Then comes Ford. Who comes next?

Jay Dubya notes that these 21 stories share similar anachronistic plots and themes dealing with movements or shifts in time. I read the first one—“The Music Disk”— about the nostalgic music experts Chad and Jeremy who long for the 50s and find themselves taken to the times sung about in the war songs on a CD from Satan Records. Two of the stories (“The Music Disk” and “Batsto Village”) are part of the free Kindle sample at Amazon.

“And look! There’s an abnormal fog cloud up ahead right near the entrance to Atlantic Blueberry’s packing house!” the history teacher alerted the already distressed and bewildered driver.—The Music Disk

In the first story (“Ian’s Ions and Eons”), a man travels back to December 2000, hoping to alter the momentus Supreme Court decision of that month. Ian and his cohorts have a reprise in “Ian, Isaac and John” (Nov 2011), where a descendant of David Bowe comes back to 1975, purportedly to improve the mix on a Bowe track, but quite possibly with additional motives involving John Lennon. And there are more stories to come, all in Analog.

Ian’s Ions and Eons (Apr 2011)

The 2000 election

Ian, Isaac and John (Nov 2011)

David Bowe and John Lennon

Ian, George and George (Dec 2013)

Orson Welles to the 1970s

The Supreme Court will announce its decision the day after tomorrow. Gore’s people want the recount to proceed in Florida. Bush’s do not.

Spoiler alert! I usually try to keep my spoilers mild, but I am irresistibly drawn to spoil Source Code, since the inventor of The Source Code in the movie explicitly says, “Source Code is not time travel. Rather, Source Code is time reassignment. It gives us access to a parallel reality.” But what does the inventor know? Go watch the movie (which I enjoyed) before reading on! A common form of time travel is when the traveler goes back in time and a new reality branches off. That’s the form of time travel that I see in Source Code, and from my reading of an interview, perhaps the director sees it that way, too. This view fits better than the parallel worlds postulate of the inventor, because each time the captain goes back, he is in exactly the same moment, with the same passengers, same comment coming from future girlfriend, same woman about to spill coffee, etc. If he were shifting to a parallel universe, then perhaps some things would differ before he arrives. So, I see it as branching worlds time travel, with the twist that the mechanism to do the time travel is to pop the traveler’s consciousness inside the head of a dead person at about eight minutes before the death. I believe that the original world where the traveler came from (and usually returns to) continues along its original path (as evinced by the fact that after one return in which he saved girlfriend, there was no record of her being saved).

From a utopian world without love or passion, 497 goes back to 21st century New Orleans to learn of these things from romance writer Elizabeth Barrett.

I really shouldn’t be telling you this, 497, but ancient legends have it that this love condition was like some kind of virus which apparently made people act in strange and illogical ways bordering in some extreme cases on obsessive dementia. It is now also thought to be one of the root causes of all the suffering in the world.

Recovering adicts Kyle, Sonia and Mike are caught in a time loop in a day away from the recovery facility when they are supposed to make amends with those they hurt; a wild spree ensues on the first few loops, and then one of them spirals off into ever-increasing violence.

Sonia: Doesn’t part of you wonder if maybe he’s right? I mean, every good thing we do gets erased; every bad thing we do gets erased. What does it really matter what we do? Kyle: I guess . . . I just need for it to matter.

This time, Bobby and Moira are in 2073 Melbourne with a mission that could get Bobby arrested, but will save millions if successful.

On the tram, I had a different kind of hassle, the usual sort. Other passengers stared at me with surprise, disdain or derision. You couldn’t blame them. For obvious reasons, we’d found no reliable records in 2099 or later of the fashions in 2073.

A guy and his 20-something Friends are visited in a coffee shop by a time traveler with limited time to tell them about the futility of fusion, how to cure autism, the solution to cancer, and other things that they are not so interested in.

A 26-year-old redheaded woman comes back in time to kill the one man in all history who has no effect on anything.

“At no point in the past or future will your life have any bearing on anything, at all,” the redheaded, twenty-something time traveler with a sleeve of tattoos tells me. “That’s why it’s okay to kill you.”

Fifty-year-old Tim goes back to the time before he was born with two important questions for the woman who would become his mother.

If you actually wanted to change things—say, to tell your mother lies about your father so she’d marry someone else, so you wouldn’t be born because you hate your life in the present—you wouldn’t be able to do it.

I love Penn and Teller’s friendly and praise-filled personalities as much as the magic of the magicians who are trying to fool the most renowned magicians (Penn and Teller themselves). One episode included the time traveling pair of Reece Morgan and Robert West.

And not only are we magicians, time travelers, and all-around spiffy chaps, we are also tourists—fourth-dimensional tourists.

I don’t always consider living life backwards to be time travel. It depends on whether or not the person in question is experiencing time in a normal forward fashion—which is not the case in this time travel story.

I could save my past self some trouble if I told him the ingredients, but I cherish those early memories of failed soup, and I worry that giving him the recipe would change the past.

As an old man, Harald recounts the days of 1928 when he was one of Mr. Fort’s original Wonder Scouts, seeking out the true explanations for inexplicable phenomena in the woods of upstate New York.

At worst, we’ll be absorbed into the super-consciousness, learning and seeing all knowledge at once in a single stupendous flash. More likely, we’ll find a tunnel to an underground civilization of pygmies or a portal through time.

Anthony and Lamar travel back to find copies of Stephen Hawking’s lost papers

That’s why the government gave us the two trillion dollar grant, so we could travel back in time and get hard copies of the monumental technical papers, and rebuild the database from the ground up, similar to what the Greeks did for the Ancient Library of Alexandria.

[May 2015]

Spy Kids: All the Time in the Worldin 4D Aroma-Scope by Robert Rodriguez (Rodriguez, director)First release: 19 Aug 2011

Perhaps this would have been better had I smelled it in the theater. As it was, though, retired spy Marissa Wilson and her family chasing the evil Timekeeper didn't grab or hold my interest long enough for me to get to the time travel parts.

In 1962, Ensign Floyd Moore is the communications officer for the blimp Centurion patrolling the Caribbean for Russian shipments of nuclear missles to Cuba. But what he and his lieutenant stumble upon on the larger Inagua island couldn’ possibly be Russian technology.

The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and no one knew it yet. Almost no one that, is.

No, I won’t vouch for this one having time travel, but it might—I just never fully understood what was happening to pilot Emil as he tries to steer(?) his dive-dreamship through a wormhole(?) while being haunted by his ex and being pulled back and forth by different possible futures vying for their existence.

“There are several futures, Emil,” Real Haneul said. ”Each one is trying to reach back to shape the past so it can be.”

I finally had a free Saturday morning, so I hulued the pilot, but couldn’t get through the melodramic story of a family from 2149 that goes back to an alternate prehistoric time stream as part of the 10th pilgrimage.

Okay, a spacetime warp. It’s formed by the interaction of the complicated magnetic field from the motor, and the rotation of the drum. The metal drum picks up an induced field and right in the center, a spacetime vortex forms. Any sock falling through disappears.

I was excited when I read that the book was intended to “challenge the reader to consider the difficult subject of predestination and free will,” but the story itself (of two time-machine-making scientists, one of whom as a boy watched to murder of his parent) was too bogged down in exposition and repetition for me to recommend.

Just think of it—time travel! If we pull this off, it will mean the Nobel Prize for sure!

Jake Epping's dying friend Al points him toward a rabbit hole that always leads to the same moment in 1958, so what can he do other than live in the Land of Ago, fall in love with Sadie, stalk Oswald and become America’s hero?

Maerleen Loegins travels back to the 1950s where she becomes a physics student and live-in help for a family where both parents are overwhelmed by young Addie, an even younger austistic Cyril, and two newborn twins.

The reason her parents had put an ad in the paper offering free room and board and a small stipend to a college student was to have someone around to look after their children, especially Cyril, who wouldn’t be ready to go to school that fall, not even to kindergarten, and might never be.

When the wife of Juko’s lifelong friend Jed gets fed up with Juko living in their garage, Jed comes up with his best plan yet, to build a time machine so Juko can go back in time and win the heart of the girl whom he's waited twenty years for, even if Juko isn’ cool like her finance is. Lauren Struck, one of the producers, sent me a press kit and an invitation to stream the film in May of 2012, precisely 35 years after my first press-kit-and-invitation-to-a-fan-to-see-an-sf-movie-preview—that other one being from a little-known producer named George something, of course, so Lauren is in excellent company. (Thank you, Lauren.)

Budding Lucy gets romantic advice from her future self via text messages. Janet found this one on the web, and we watched a daily installment with tea in my first September of retirement. In the second season, our heroine switches from nicely nerdy Lucy (Shiri Appleby) to lovely and lonely Chloe (Candice Accola). Now, if we can only get writer Sallie Patrick to slip some time travel into the other show she works on, Revenge.

This show has a Ph.D. with a comic book shop, a kindly old uncle, Vince Lombardi as a 1963 jail warden, a crochety FBI agent who really has a kind heart, residents of 1963 Alcatraz showing up today, and a girl with a gun! What’s not to love?

All the prisoners were transferred off the island, only that’s not what happened—not at all.

Sheriff Lyle, daydreaming of his retirement just outside of Bozeman, spots his brainiac buddy Pete and his egghead nephew Jimmy chasing a Deinonychus full-speed down the highway in their stretch-cab Ram pickup—and it’s not the only one on the loose.

“Lookee here, it’s good you know what this thing is, but where in hell did it come from?” “The early Cretaceous. One hundred twenty million years ago,” Peter said. Sometimes real smart people can be a little dense.

“The Man Who Murdered Mozart” by Robert Walton and Barry N. MalzbergFirst publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2012

In the late 21st century, frustrated violin player Howard Beasley and his six friends make a plan to kidnap Mozart from his death bed, so that Beasley can get him to finish his Requiem and thereby ride the crest of the ensuing admiration to becoming the head of the world.

Perhaps you know how much I enjoy being deeply dragged into an engaging story, and then, only after some time, realizing that it’s a time travel story. If you haven’t yet read this story, then I apologize for depriving you of that pleasure. Now go read it now and find out about why Mrs. Hatcher’s teaching methods are indeed ”best practices.”

Not until the fourth reincarnation of the My Little Pony cartoons did Twilight Sparkle dabble in time travel by receiving a dire warning from her future self (“It’s about Time,” Episode 20 of Season 2).

Who are you? I mean, you’re me, but I’m me, too. How can there be two me’s? It’s not scientifically possible. You are not scientifically possible!

Living in Minneapolis, fifty-something Bob Marshall and his cult-band friend Clayton discover a website that can move them through time: Bob back to the eighties where he longs to save his long-dead girlfriend Gretchen from his younger self; Clayton to the future where he seeks a diabetes cure.

“This web site, Bob,” he said to me, shaking the snow off his black beret, sitting down beside me at the bar, ”it’s a time travel site. Time travel?”

At the end of Wilber’s first Moe Berg story, Moe himself admits that he doesn’t know what’s going on, and I admit that I’m in the same boat—but I can tell you that that was the first story that I read in the Moe Berg subgenre of time travel stories. In this case, Red Sox catcher Moe Berg travels (as he did in real life) to Zurich with the mission to kill Heisenberg, but this is only one of many Moe Berg lives; in many of those lives he interacts with a beautiful young woman and seeming time-travel agent who only sometimes encourages him to kill Heisenberg. You can also read about Moe in one other of Wilber’s alternate history stories and at least one independently conceived story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Time machines are useful after you commit a crime, especially a crime of passion.

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy—one of those ones from the kits in the back of Popular Mechanics will do fine. But the point is that you need one. If you don’t have one, then forget about it. There’s nothing you can do.

When Boris the Animal escapes from lunar prison and returns to 1969 to kill Agent K and expose Earth to attack, Agent J must follow to save Agent K and Earth. Tim and I saw this with Michelle on Fathers Day Eve in 2012.

Policewoman Kiera Cameron is sucked into a time transporter when a group of seven terrorists escape from 2077 to 2012. For me, the main drawback is the stereotyped terrorists whom Kiera fights; I felt that they didn’t need to be pure evil, particularly when the governments of the future have all be overtaken by corporations.

I didn’t understand the significance of the title clock in this story story told from the point of view of Marta who could have been a brilliant mathematician, but such was not allowed in 1950s America, so instead we hear of Marta’s grandmother’s clock and a search for the missing grandmother, meeting (along the way) at least one old woman who seems out of time.

Grandma and I have a theory about how John Carter found his way to Mars. We think we can explain it with Schrödinger’s equation.

[Jan 2015]

The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee by John HambrockFirst time travel: 3 Jun 2012

Young Edison Lee is Danny Dunn (from my childhood) meets Bill Watterson’s Calvin (from my kids’ childhood), complete with a time machine (which both Danny and Calvin also had). The first appearance I saw was in 2012, although it wasn’t until 2014 that the real travelin’ seemed to start, with a trip back to 1972. Even then, though, I almost put the whole thing into the it’s-only-in-his-imagination category, but what could possibly be more real than a kid’s imagination?

Edison Lee: So do me a favor. In forty-two years don’t let me “borrow” your tools without your knowledge to build this stupid time machine. 1972 Dad: I’m such a horrible father. Edison Lee: And buy more chocolate milk.

Shy, beautiful Darius, an intern at Seattle Magazine, goes to investigate an awkward guy who placed an ad calling for a companion for a time-travel adventure. Janet and I saw this for our 32nd anniversary. What a wife!

No, I don’t understand Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories any more than you do (and quite possibly no more than the author does), but the fact remains that I like the images in his writing (such as “Droplet”), and in “Elsewhere” I detected something that could be time travel as much as Anything Else. And foolish you thought I never fell for abstract art.

That’s how they beat the time-skew problem: Not Very would express sentiments and opinions aloud, then shuffle through the images to find those which contained (and had always already contained) Unlike Themselves’ responses.

When Sam (the good sister) fills in for waitress Marlo (the not-so-good one) at the diner, a bad guy leaves a time of ancient coins that end up getting Sam killed by the bad guy’s even badder boss, but fortunately 70-year-old Agnes also has some of the coins which repeatedly let Marlo go back to try to change things.

After the events of “12:02 P.M.,” Myron Castleman finds that he can jump back to different times, not just 12:01 P.M., and that he can make small changes that have big consequences—although it’s still nearly impossible to get anyone to believe his story, except, perhaps, for Dolores.

The man in the dark suit has become the most talked-about mystery man in the world. Who is he? Where did he come from? He appeared and unquestionably saved the life of one President but inadvertently—we presume inadvertently—caused the death of another.

Too much exorcist and not enough consistent time travelin’ for my taste; even so, I enjoyed this story of a future where gangsters send inconvenient people back in time to be killed by hitmen in the past, and eventually each hitman is sent back to be killed by himself.

If I hurt myself, it changes your body; so, does what I do now change your memory?

Solberg—a rich, individualist inventor—insists on using his time machine without having it vetted by his staff, and he thereby falls into a trap. Perhaps I have just read too much time travel (blasphemy!), but I feel that Carhart fell into the same trap as her protagonist: For me, the story needed to be vetted by someone who could say how much this particular idea needs a new twist if it’s to work.

Alex Jablokov brought this funny story for the students to read at the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2014. The story, in the form of a letter from the future, tells us how much happier and better the future is. And don’t contact them again! I loved meeting Alex. He is kind and mentoring to new writers!

In the year 3085, the four children of the Courageous Battlers (who died) form a new team to right wrongs (such as that time loop in the first regular episode, “Time Slime”) across the universe using the power of their emotions and other moop.

John, Ellie and Marcus have a spot in late 16th century London where they live nine months of the year to escape the destruction of the Now, but even the future of that space is uncertain as the enemy hunts them.

Living space is tough to find, though—there just aren’t many places in any city of any time that will stay overlooked for the duration. The invisible spaces of Babylon in 1700BC would already be staked out and claimed by whoever was taking refuge there.

Mona, who works as a file clerk in the modern-day Wisconsin office of the Time Displacement Bureau, suspects that her new nieghbor may be a displaced time traveler or time terrorist, but her awkwardness prevents her from effectively findout out more.

Skirmishes with Purity were no laughing matter, and any traveler who showed the slightest inclination toward interfering with the past would find his or her license permanently removed. But it made for a good story.

[Sep 2014]

The New Yorker Cartoons by Tom Toro, et. al.First one that I saw: 17 Dec 2012

I’d wager there have been many New Yorker cartoons with time machines, but the first one I saw came to me from my high school friend Jim Martin, written and drawn by Tom Toro in the 17 Dec 2012 issue (I think) and reprinted in a Readers’s Favorites contest in 2013.

My theory is that the Tachyons, which are moving backward through space/time will——“Final Effect”

[May 2015]

“Boomerang” by Russell JamesFirst publication: Out of Time: Five Tales of Time Travel, 2013

When Robbie’s tenure comes to an end as a historical researcher at the Bridenbaugh Institute, he’s offered the chance to actually study the Great Depression in person—but only because another wacko has gone back to change history.

Yes, but to do it, you are letting a kidnapper brutally murder a child. There’s a moral case for Akako’s actions.

[Aug 2014]

All royalties from Out of Time are donated to Doctors without Borders.

“The Paths We Choose” by Paul SiluchFirst publication: Out of Time: Five Tales of Time Travel, 2013

A janitor in a physics lab uses the lab’s time travel cage to go back in time and alter the outcome of abusive moments that made him who he is.

Intelligence was a wind blowing humanity faster and faster. But a man can hide from the wind, he thought. Even change its direction for a moment.

[Jul 2014]

The authors of the Out of Time anthology also published this second volume a year later.

“A Thousand Different Copies” by Janet GuyFirst publication: Out of Time: Five Tales of Time Travel, 2013

Lieutenant Kyuoko Morioka travels seventy years into the past to bring the inventor of time travel to her day because strange anomalies are appearing in the time stream.

I’m from seventy years in the future, and we need you to save us all.

[Jul 2014]

from Teresa Robeson’s website

“Unfillable Void” by Teresa RobesonFirst publication: Out of Time: Five Tales of Time Travel, 2013

Cindy Lau’s mother died when Cindy was young, motivating adult Cindy to invent time travel in order to spend as much time as possible with her mother before the death.

Nobody thought Cindy would devote her life to studying the nature of time solely to fill the hold in her heart, even as she immersed herself in the subject during the last year of her undergrad degree. Nobody believed she would succeed when the mechanics of temporal movement had eluded some of the greatest minds in physics.

[Aug 2014]

from Kelly Horn’s website

“The Widow in the Woods” by Kelly HornFirst publication: Out of Time: Five Tales of Time Travel 2013

Grad student Max has just four hours to find his shady his shady friend's brother who's been lost in time at an old archaeological dig site.

Ex-felon Peter Bitner jumps at the chance for a steady job with Dr. Jonas Gorski, only to end up debating time-travel paradoxes and ethics with the disgraced scientist who keeps building bigger and bigger time machines.

Stop Hitler and what else do you alter? Millions of lives saved, sure, but billions of lives changed.

Ali Campbell-Lopez’s mother dies and comes out of a coma for the fourth time under circumstances that imply Ali has powers that will interest various national security agencies and enemy spies, prompting a violent assault on Ali and her teenage daughter, soon followed by the appearance of a much younger, time-traveling version of her mother.

You wanted to build a time machine to go back and save my grandfather!

In the future, when a worker loses his job, he has little choice but to participate in medical experiments, such as the experiment that Adam Leben undertakes to become a new type of human who will then be sent back to seed the Earth.

I’ve got a few kinks I’ve got to work out. You see . . . see, it fragments the personality right now, and there’s . . . no return.

One of my rules is that time travel must involve interaction, which this story—of a literary engineer visiting deaths of his literary heroes—might not have, but I like James Van Pelt enough that I wanted to list the story anyway (and mark my first visit to Daily Science Fiction).

Time travel existed, but I could not interact with the past or the future.

For me, the main story of time-travel agent Leah wandering from one World War II encounter with Heisenberg to another did not have a clear notion of time travel, and the ties to the uncertainty principle were not germaine to the story. The exposition of the uncertainty principle itself was also confused, conflating it with the observer effect and not correctly representing the fact that a particle cannot simultaneously possess both a sharply localized position and a sharply localized momentum. On the other hand, I did enjoy the opening scene with Moe Berg, and the mix-ups are partly from his layman’s point-of-view.

Werner Heisenberg’s controversial uncertainty principle was one of the cornerstones of quantum physics. Heisenberg postulated that it was possible to know a particle’s position or that it was possible to know how fast the particle moved, but no one could know both the position and movement of the particle at the same time. Berg had spent quite a bit of time in Oxford, talking with leading scientists as he prepared for this job, and one of them used a description that moved away from particles into theory, which Berg appreciated. That scientist had told Berg that at its core, Heisenberg’s principle meant this: The act of observing changes the thing being observed.

Agents of the Temporal Response Bureau—a.k.a. Eraser-Men—protect the timeline, but given what happened to her husband, Grace does not approve when her own 17-year-old son applies to become an agent and is accepted.

A ten-year-old boy manages to first lose his sister in 11th-century Britain (via his father’s time machine) and then lose his Pop somewhere in the 9th-century Bulgarian Empire. The sister is found fairly quickly, but not until thirty years later does an archeology colleague bring a clue as to exactly where his father might be.

When he’d left the room for a moment Sis dared me to send her somewhere.

For some reason, the world has splintered into a multitude of pockets from different times and different timelines. Who ya gonna call? Whitsun—pocketbuster.

But nobody had any explanations to proffer concerning why the Storm had splintered the world into probability-zones, replacing slices of the known, familiar present with slices of past, future, or alternative presents more or less probable.

Tim denies it, but there’s a little-known rule that says that any time Spock Prime gets to talk to new Spock, the movie is counted as possessing time travel under a grandfather clause, even if said movie contained no actual new time travel. For me, the dark aspects of the movie were nothing but forced melodrama, although it did have great special effects, terrific casting of the principles, and fun trekkie jokes. Those positives, though, weren’t enough to cover up the plot holes and Kirk’s questionabe decisions. Good grief, just blast the bad guy with a photon torpedo rather than blasting your way through a bunch of Klingons (who never harmed you) to give the guy a fair trial. And if you don’t do that, at least blast him to bits on the bridge of that dreadnaught.

As you know, I have made a vow never to give you information that could potentially alter your destiny. Your path is yours to walk and yours alone.

After Dr. Keith O’Conner sends a message back in time to save his dead son, it seems that there is always one more message that needs sending.

It was a matter of life and death for Dr. Keith O’Conner. Not his life, but the life of his son. That’s why he had invented time travel . . . the transmission of electrically charged impulses back through the years to a human brain . . . his brain, to be precise.

[Jul 2015]

Wilson has also written a series of Flatworld books about a world beyond the void.

Molly goes back in time to try to experience the true love of Helen of Troy of Cleopatra, but she is disappointed that she can only observe. Based on that, I was about to relegate the story to the no-time-travel pile, when I spotted something that changed my mind.

We can only be spectators of the past. Passengers, along for the ride.

Paul Chadwick’s exquisitely detailed and dynamic art illustrates Harlan Ellison’s story of a band of seven resilient misfits from across the solar system who are led by the deeply scarred Roack, hoping to bring an end to the time chaos that plagues Earth. The work comes across as dated, but still, I enjoyed seeing the latest work from my childhood friend, Paul Chadwick.

The crisis computers say the structure of Earth’s local field of time itself is collapsing. Eras are mixing.

[Nov 2013]

“Dear Tomorrow” by Simon ClarkFirst publication: The Mammoth Book of Time Travel, Jul 2013

Among the myriad of sad stories of people who desperately wish to turn back the clock—John Salvin who loses his wife and child in a vanished plane, Kamana Banerjee who loses her husband to a random bullet—a reality tv program, Impossible, Isn’t It?, plans to archive the most heart-wrenching of the stories for future time travelers who may respond to those pleas by coming back to appear on the program and providing solice.

What’s more, it’s my personal belief that time machines will be invented one day; that’s why I’m inviting time-travelling viewers from the distant future to visit us at our rendezvous point on Mount Snowden in North Wales, on the tenth of July—

By my count, the Flashpoint comics by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert had a total of 72 comics, but it all fit in 81 minutes of this animated dvd in which the Flash awakens without his powers in a world where the rest of the Justice League is at war with pretty much everyone. Initially, he blames his arch-enemy Professor Zoom for messing with the timeline, but it turns out that it’s not Zoom who needs to be stopped from time traveling.

We have to find out what he changed and change it back before they kill everyone on the planet.

For this rejected-series pilot, mega-handwaving went into creating a setting where a government team could send people back to change the past in a way that the team and the travelers can remember the original timeline and observe the effect of any changes—somewhat like Seven Days but without without the charm of Lt. Frank Parker. My thought is that one particular plot device totally missed the boat: The team has a technology that allows them to confidently predict the outcome of any proposed change before enacting it. Imagine how boring The Butterfly Effect would have been had Evan had such a technology in his pocket. Even so, I would have watched this series if it had ever made it into full production.

Basically, Charlie can show us how an action in the past creates ripples in the present.

[Feb 2015]

This was the first professionally published story that I read by one of my Odyssey Workshop classmates—nicely done, Chip!

At Lydia’s second time at the Time Travel Club, she tells them of her pirate activities in the past and her solar sail demolition races in the future, which is all well and good until the outlandish Madame Alberta shows up and asks them all to help her with ethical questions of building a real time machine, not to mention figuring out a rather strange use for the thing.

They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children.

Imagine that you’re a boy in 1921 Cambridge when your sister dies falling down a well. What would you do? Naturally, you’d vow to become a great scientist in an artsy movie so you can go back in time to alter the tragic event.

Annie: Are you ready to leave? Stephen: Yes. Annie: How long will it take? Stephen: I don’t know: seconds, decades, an eternity. Annie: An eternity? For a few moments together? Stephen: Yes.

Reggie, the turkey who’s awarded the Thanksgiving presidential pardon, has it pretty cushy until he’s kidnapped by Jake for a mission (via time machine S.T.E.V.E., voiced by George Takei) to stop the first Thanksgiving.

Poor Rachel McAdams—always the bride, never the time traveler. This time it’s romantic comedy with Domhnall Gleeson in the time traveling co-star role. For me, the writer/director had a good vision, but couldn’t make it gel.

I can’t kill Hitler or shag Helen of Troy, unfortunately.

[May 2014]

“The Chorus Line” by Daniel HatchFirst publication: Analog, Dec 2013

Billionaire Mr. Croesus thinks Eric Cunningham faked the 4-million-year-old images of our ancestors dancing that made such a hit on YouTube recently, and he intends to prove it.

The concensus is that butterflies don’t know anything about regression analysis. Things tend to return to their mean over time

At the start, a young girl’s father has died and then snow starts falling upward. Later, after a slightly creepy falling-in-love by a man named Horatio, there’s an FBI agent, quite possibly Fox Multer, who’s very good at guessing things. Then her husband dies and we discover that her good guessing comes from being able to wind back time a few seconds—and I’m lost, my patience exhausted before any meaning appears.

They would land less than a nanosecond after their initial departure; to witness the alternate future they had now created by introducing so many technological advances to the once uninformed bipedal creatures.—“Intentional Paradox”

Future Carl informs Carl that the life he’s leading is the only one that’s insignificant enough that no paradox or disaster can possibly occur as a result of his time travel. Steve and his wife Melanie were the writers-in-residence at the 2014 Odyssey Writers Workshop which I attended with many wonderful students and two remarkable writers-in-residence. Melanie died the following spring, and we all miss her wisdom and kindness greatly.

The only difference, apparently, is the major dressing used on a roast beef club sandwich at a place called Garalfalo’s.

[Apr 2015]

The Chronos Files by Rysa WalkerFirst book: Jan 1, 2014

The first book in Rysa Walker’s Chrons Files series, Timebound, won the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The book follows 16-year-old Prudence “Kate” Pierce-Keller to 1893 where a murder risks wiping out everything she knows, including herself. A novella (Time’s Echo) and a novel (Time’s Edge) are also part of the series.

I was feeling very shaky on my feet. I’d never had any sort of hallucination, and the sounds and images had seemed so real, like I was actually experiencing them firsthand.

Every ten years, Melissa casts a spell that makes her and the narrator flit back, experiencing earlier times, all in the spot where the roller rink used to be.

See, this is how it happens. I’m in that place I want to be, then suddenly it’s twenty years later and Melissa is telling me what a son of a bitch I am and why did I have to screw the whole thing up just as she’d finally got the fucking spell right?

When people from the future put on a faire outside of Portland, Tyler and his parents are among the first in line to visit. As a reader, I’m hoping that deaf Tyler will come away cured, despite the prominent sign announcing: NO TECHNOLOGY IS TO LEAVE THE FAIREGROUNDS!

I’m curious why people from the future would need cash, but my father says, “Business is business, no matter when you’re from.”

[Aug 2014]

A Murder in Time by Jonas SaulFirst publication: 23 Jan 2014

Things start going wrong as soon as Marcus Johnson staged the fake robbery at the store that he managed—not the least of which was himself appearing outside the store and looking in at himself getting ready to undertake the robbery, presumably because of those time-travel experiments his mother participated in when she was pregnant.

Last night when he locked up and stared out the window, he had seen someone familiar starting back at him from the parking lot’s light standard. That someone appeard to be crying and was dressed exactly as he was right now.

Do legos time travel? Maybe not, but they do go to an old west universe where Emmet asks, “Do you think you can explain to me why I'm dressed like this? And what those big words in the sky were all about? And, like, where we are . . . in time?” Those questions, together with the quote shown below, get the movie into my time-travel list.

A down-on-his-luck physicist who’s invented a faster-than-light drive stops to watch the first manned Mars landing in a small-town Georgia diner. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that ties together ftl with time travel.

And you’ll discover something else when you’re tinkering with that drive.

This is the first time-travel story that I ran across in the enjoyable monthly, Flash Fiction Online. Among others, Andrew J. Salt from the Creation Museum of Petersburg, Kentucky, has an interest in getting by Charles Darwin’s gatekeeper.

It seemed Mr Salt had completed a difficult journey today and was impatient. He was in possession of a powerful new idea that must be brought to Mr Darwin’s notice.

[Jan 2015]

I don’t like to use the same cover illustration twice, so here’s an interior illustration for a poem in the March 2014 Asimov’s.

JFK-viewers are clichéd in time travel, but Ted White—a favorite of mine from his time as Amazing and Fantastic editor—has a new twist as every observer sees a different version of the assasination attempt.

Kennedy wasn’t hit. Neither was Connally. I didn’t bother sticking around after that.

The movie had some good one-liners and even some good (albeit worn) puns in the style of the original cartoon, but for me, the plot lacked even enough structure to hold the attention of a child and the writer was writing down to his audience so much so that not even Patrick Warburton’s voice in a small part was sufficient to rescue the story from the fast-forward button.

Very well, then: If a boy can adopt a dog, the I see no reason why a dog can’t adopt a boy.

After eight-year-old Jake Langston drowns in a river, 32 years pass before he reappears, unchanged, in a rice paddy in China. They can call it resurection, but it quacks like time travel to me, even if Jake’s original body is still in that mausoleum.

Forty-three-year-old Paul Beaumont, who used to switch places with his twin brother Thomas, faces sentencing in a court where the sentence is always death and the worst death option involves government time-traveling executioners—although the universe will allow the sentence to be carried out only after the condemned no longer has a future contribution of importance.

“I order death from category K.” Somehow these words sound less insidious than the proper name. There is only one type of death in this category. It's called “Erasure.”

James takes his one-minute time machine to a park bench to try to pick up quantum physicist Rachel. Janet showed this five-minute film-festival film to me on my first prime birthday of the 2010 decade.

I’m not a regular reader of the funnies any more, so I can’t tell you when Dr. Mel in the Brewster Rockit strip first made use of his time machine, but my friend Jim (see Zits, above) also showed me the doctor’s use of his time machine to avoid having a late taxes penalty.

Dr. Mel, you forgot to file your taxes last week! You missed the tax deadline!